Plans for the new version of the site are still evolving. A lot of work to be done between now and going live.
However, I can say at this stage that it's not going to be a case of picking up where the site left off. There are other sites out there which offer the same type of channel branding content. So, I'll be looking to do something a little different - though there'll still be a certain amount of overlap with content on other sites.
As anyone who has ever attempted to run a large site will understand, it consumes a huge amount of time. And it really has to be labour of love - because it's otherwise pretty much a thankless task. I don't have the time or energy to run something of TV Room's 2005 - 2011 scope. Some of the earliest sites such as TV Ark and TV Room started off in the late-1990s when internet technologies were in their infancy. There was no such thing as a CMS. Pages were built manually. As the years went on, more clever ways of maintaining sites were developed. Changing the look of a site was absolute agony. I went through that terrible pain a number of times. Hundreds of pages had to be revisited and many manual changes applied. in 2005, I moved The TV Room Plus on to a bespoke set of CMSs - that process wasn't too bad as that site was relatively small. Moving the main site to its new CMS in 2006 though proved a much bigger task than I had anticipated. Each page had to be rebuilt from scratch. I also used this an opportunity to re-capture all the images using better quality equipment. It turned into an absolutely massive job, which by 2011 was still not complete.
It turned into a constant uphill struggle, which never seemed to end. And it continues to annoy me that so many sections are incomplete. But sometimes, it's just better to admit defeat. I'm certainly satisfied that I gave it a bloody good try.
So, the new TV Room will be a smaller scale, more manageable venture.
It would be nice to try and keep some of the more unique sections of the original site going - such as Presenter/Announcers and Listings. However, I simply don't have the time to maintain them and do them justice. I could certainly take care of the technical set-up and help get the sections looking more modern and mobile friendly etc. If anyone out there would be interested in partnering on maintaining content in those sections, please get in touch.
To end on, there's nothing a pres enthusiast likes more than a bit of nostalgia. So, here's a quick dip into the archive:
2002:
2004
Note: the site's (by now horizontal) menu bar was normally just under the page banner but doesn't display in modern browsers.
