Notice anything new? Take a look around, I’ll wait. Welcome to version 3 of YGG.

If you’re a visitor or member, you’ve probably seen how quiet YGG has been for the past month or so. Most of the feature sections have been inactive for over a month and new bugs have popped up here and there.

What happened was, we kind of got sick of YGG, more specifically, the process of maintaining it. What you don’t see behind the scenes is a complex admin that we used to add content to each of the sections. It’s a very tedious process that consumed a lot of time and energy, even for minor updates.

That process pretty much frustrated us to the point where we lost the enthusiasm to maintain everything. It was a pain in the ass.

Our original priority was to create great content and enable young go getters to do the same. We lost sight of that vision in a web of technical details. We stopped having fun.

That had to change, and it did, to what you see before you. Call it version 3, the new, new YGG, or whatever you wish. We’ll call it right. It’s right in all the areas that the previous version was wrong.

We took a big risk investing all the time and money we did into the old site. We learned an enormous amount about the development process, hiring contractors, and building a community.

All the mistakes we made served as a guide for the new site. Instead of putting out fires in a structure that’s not stable, we built a new structure with the strongest foundation yet.

For anyone that currently maintains or is looking to create a blog, forum, or any other form of a community, make sure you don’t do anything we did in version 2, at least intentionaly, and use version 3 and our lessons, as a starting point for your process.

10 things we did wrong and how we fixed them:

Old Site

1. iFrames
2. Separate sections for content
3. No RSS feeds
4. Couldn’t share or bookmark content
5. No SEO whatsoever
6. Extremely slow
7. Couldn’t add new sections or features
8. Took over 5 months to build
9. Tried to reinvent the wheel
10. Frustrating to build

New Site

1. No frames whatsoever
2. Sections all combined into one blog
3. One simple RSS feed
4. Can easily share a post or thread on any social bookmark site, e-mail it to yourself or a friend, copy and paste a unique URL
5. Highly optimized for search engines so you can easily find anything
6. Loads several times faster
7. Can add new sections, extensions, content, in minutes, not days or weeks
8. Altogether, took about a week and a half to build from scratch
9. Used the same wheel as everyone else, but made it look our own.
10. Our hearts haven’t slowed down since we started

Let’s make this year the most remarkable yet and have a helluva’ time while we’re at it.

Please note, there is still a lot of work ahead for us in converting all of the previous content to the new platform. Bear with us if you see anything funny and be sure to let us know about it. More posts will follow with a better explanation of all the new features.