I know what you’re probably thinking, “Kane!? Did you really have to redesign the website again? I was just getting used to the old one.”

Short answer: Yes. Yes, I did.

There are all sorts of reasons why I redesign the website as much as I do. Site bloat, cutting costs, new techniques, my own insanity. The list goes on. I won’t bore you with the details, but essentially it was just time to simplify a few things, save some money, and focus on the basics.

What’s new?

The biggest change was how the site is organized. I ditched a lot of the fluff and honed in on each of the active groups in the Shire. The site is almost entirely used by members of the group and so I separated everything into our specific Companies/Guilds. If you want something to do with Order of the Rose, go to the Order of the Rose section. If you’re wondering about Iron Thorn, find it in the Iron Thorn section. Each section has links and resources related to the group, while The Shire kind of envelopes everything else.

Under the hood, I pulled out some of the really advanced tools that were allowing us to design some fancy stuff. This website uses a software called WordPress and I wanted to leverage a lot more of its inherent functionality. Unless you’re writing posts, the only thing that really changes for you is speed. Ditch some cargo and you can usually go faster. It’s not going to be perfect, but my fingers are crossed.

Speaking of writing posts, because I ditched a lot of the fancy tools, the whole post creation process has changed. No more Articles, Journal Entries, or Lore posts. No more events and knowledge pages, and whatever. There are just posts and pages. In my opinion, it’s a lot simpler and hopefully, more people can get involved. I’d be happy to show anyone how to write posts for the website. Everyone who had an account should still be able to log in using the Login link down at the bottom of every page. If there are issues or you want to learn more, just let me know.

So I hope you look around and get a feel for the “new” site and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

Note: There are still a few missing pieces. Leader images, bios, descriptions, etc… I’ll be reaching out over the winter to try to collect those before the start of season. If you find any information that you know of, please let me know.