That's right, the 2008 GUI Champs are approaching!  The last event, which wrapped up at the end of 2006, was a big success and we're aiming to top things with this year's edition.  One of the first things we're looking at revamping is the GUIC Website.  If you look back, you'll see that we used the 2004 site again in 2006, and it didn't age well.  For a competition focused on GUI greatness, the site was pretty embarrassing.  It was also very buggy and hard to update with contest results etc.

So this year it's back to the drawing board!

One thing people probably don't realize is how much planning has to go into even a relatively simple site like the GUIC one.  It's not as simple as throwing together an upload page, news page, gallery page and skin page and call it done.  For the 2008 GUIC Site, we have to design and implement over a dozen completely unique pages, each with very different tech requirements.

Here are a few of the big improvements that are currently being talked about.  Keep in mind we're still in the design phase of this, so it's all subject to change.  But I wanted to tease everyone a bit with this to get some interest going in the competition, and to get some feedback on what you'd like to see in the site.

Stardock sites are based on a very complex and detailed articles system that has grown over the years.  Basically, imagine one gigantic forum.  Hundreds of categories and subcategories containing thousands upon thousands of posts.  Each site (WinCustomize, JoeUser, TotalGaming) takes a subset of that master list for its own forums.

We've been working on cleaning up our system the last few months.  Cleaning up data, optimizing the database etc.  This week we've been working on the master forum category list.

Today, andrew_ printed out the category tree for two sites, WinCustomize and JoeUser....

Today marks the launch of the WC2k7 website.  The new site is just packed with new stuff as well as improvements to older features.  To make sure everyone gets the most out of the new tools we've included, this article is a brief tutorial familiarizing you with some of the more useful bits. 1.  Breadcrumbs WinCustomize is big.  I mean really big.  It's kind of mind-boggling when you come to realize just how big it is.  I mean you may think it's a long way d...

The response to Part 1 here was better than I could have possibly expected. I was given a very simple answer to what I thought was a complex problem based on what every ASP.NET help site out there told me. What my ASP.NET book told me was a page and a half of code to do, a helpful reader (mick_k) showed me was really just one line. I'm a huge fan of collaboration and seeking out knowledge and advice from a community... it makes everyone's life so much easier when they hit a roadblock. ...

Alright, at work I've been told I have to build a web tool that takes a 40 question survey, analyzes the answers given, then based on the answers generate custom content from a large stack of documents. Fair enough. The catch is I have to do it in ASP.NET, and not PHP because ASP.NET is supported by IT whereas PHP is not (despite the fact that IT runs serveral PHPNuke sites, which obviously relies on PHP). So, I've been trying to learn ASP.NET for the purpose of building this tool. In t...

I've seen all of these "free XYZ if you refer X people" offer sites before, but I've never actually given one a shot. I'm curious now if this one is real at all. The deal is refer a bunch of people to the site and you get a free iPod. So, if you have a spam mail account (like hotmail) or something you can toss into this sign-up form, it'd be appreciated. I'd like to see how this all works out. If you do sign-up, leave a comment below saying so... Here's the link http://www.freeiPo...

I'm what you would consider a bit of a Internet veteran. I don't go as far back as the mainframe days, in fact I'm mostly from the age of the Macintosh and the first PCs... but I've been online for quite some time now (earliest net memories involve BITNET, Gopher, Archie & Veronica etc...). I've been using the WWW almost from the beginning of it (I used to have the first release of NCSA Mosaic) and I've been involved in online communities off and on ever since. I've seen a lot of attempts m...