My own personal cheerleader.

I always look so angry in my drawings.

Last Saturday, I officially launched the new GameHounds website. After the failed first attempt at a redesign, I went back and started from scratch. After settling on the open-source Compositio theme, I decided to go for a very clean look with minimal graphics usage. It’s a style I’ve worked hard to grow over the last few months, and I feel I’m finally at the point where I’m able to really convey solid messaging through only a few well-placed pieces of imagery. The site is very fun and light, but loaded with useful and dynamic content. The “Latest Tweet” widget (as seen on this site), that I have been perfecting over the last month, has yet again found its way onto another site. And most importantly of all, my old pal Edgey has once again outdone himself with his amazing illustration skills. All-in-all, I’m very proud of what was accomplished in a very short period of time.

Since debuting the new theme, the reaction from my co-hosts and the fans has been fantastic! Everyone loves the little dog graphics and the new easy-on-the-eyes look. In a thread about the new theme on the Platform Nation Forums, a listener made a comment that they loved the new site, and praised me on the new design. They also mentioned that they didn’t know if Hawkes had anything to do with the development process, but if he did, they extended the praise to him as well. I clicked the reply button to write a ‘thank you’, and say that although Hawkes didn’t directly work on the new GameHounds site, he did act as my personal cheerleader during the development. I stopped and said “Boy, I bet that sure would be funny if I literally drew Hawkes as a cheerleader….”

Twenty minutes later, this was the result. I lol’d, and so did everyone else.

However, in all seriousness, I did want to take this moment to give a big ‘thank you‘ to Edie and Hawkes. They were both incredibly supportive of me during the entire development process, and in addition, they are easily two of the most professional podcasters that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I hope this site is only the first step into a new era of awesome for the GameHounds podcast, and its wonderful fans. Thank you to everyone.