Year: 2005

We’ve gotten a great response to our new promotion section, promote.awesomestart.com. We’re also getting a lot of new traffic from eBaum’s world as well GorillaMask.net. Thanks for the links everyone! In a nod to our new users from these very popular sites, we’ve got a newgrounds theme from a brand new freelance artist.

We’re working on a new system to manage the thousands of requestes coming in every day. Until the system is finished, we’re not going to be able to take any more theme requests. As we build this new system, we’ll still be posting a new theme five times a week for you.

Hang in there, the themes are coming!

We’re doing the best we can with the resources we have to get all your requests taken care of. All our freelancers are back to work – We’ve got a new theme for The Ring, A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, and The Bravery up all in one day. That has to be some new kind of record for us – a record we’d like to break.

This is where YOU come in!

The less time we spend promoting the site, the more time we have to work on new themes. You can help by simply sharing the site with your friends, making a myspace post, or, best of all, adding our link or banner to your site! We appreciate all the support we’re getting. Thanks a lot guys!

It took us long enough, but we’ve finally added the ability to Edit your preferences. It’s doesn’t work perfectly quite yet, but it’s getting there. When you go to the page, all the preferences you have saved will load automatically. The only issue at this point is that you’ll have to change the bottom links from “Default” to “Custom” in order to see your custom links (the same is true if you’ve set your email to “Other.”) Also, there is currently no easy way to reset these links to their default. If you’d really like to use the page defaults for the bottom links, you should delete the Link Name field complete and set the url field back to http://.

We’d like to thank our freelance designer Julie Morris for supplying today’s new theme for No Doubt. Since she began working with us just a few weeks ago, she’s become our number one theme submitter. She’s working on a few more new themes while Eric works out some of the bugs in the 2.0 release, so expect to see even more of her work this week.

On a final note, we’ve been getting hundreds of submissions a day since the new site launched. Not all have been followed up on, but we are sorting and assigning them to our designers. We’ve definitely underestimated the number of request that are now pouring in, but we’re still committed to our five a week promise. While these pages are being worked on, we’re also designing a new submission system to better track and rank your requests so we can get you the pages you want faster.

After months of development, AwesomeStart 2.0 is finally online. Before I get into the details, a big thanks goes out to Jule Morris who has been supplying us with new themes all week. Her work gave us a chance to focus our full efforts on the new design and not worry about supplying fresh content for everyone in the process. As we attempt to fill everyone’s demand for new movie pages this next week, she’ll be designing a few more music ones for us.

The biggest thing you’ll notice about the new site is a fresh look. As I’ve mentioned before, version 1.0 always felt very temporary to us. We wanted to create something that looked a bit more professional. The look isn’t the only thing that changed, though. The site also loads faster and displays more content at once than the old one.

Our most important change has to be the new gallery system. No long does the entire theme library load into one screen. You can now look at themes by their category (music, movie, and other). As wee add more and more themes to the site, we realize it’s getting harder to find the one you want. That’s why every page on the site now has a search function in the upper right hand corner. This search function searches all of AwesomeStart for the terms you provide. In this way, you could search for the name of a band or movie and see if there is a page for it.

As always, there’s much more coming soon. Look for more skins all next week. We’re just getting warmed up.

Julie Morris has given us two great new, much needed themes. Go see her work on the Brand New and Jimmy Eat World skins. Check back later today for the new Good Charlotte one!

This will be the last formal update before the big launch. We’re almost ready for Saturday’s 2.0 launch. At this point, it’s just a matter of adding a few graphics and churning out four new movie pages. THIS LAUNCH WILL HAPPEN regardless of whether these things are finished or not. You’ve waited long enough for this! In all honestly we should have everything suited up by tonight, and then it’s just a matter of running though the whole site at testing. Anyhow, back to work!

We’re got a brand new guest skin (SUGARCOAT!) by a brand new additon to our team, Julie Morris!

There’s a lot of buzz regarding AwesomeStart Version 2.0 flying around the net, so it would probably be a good idea to clear some of this up. We have set a temporary online launch date of 10.22.2005 (next Saturday). This is the FIRST TIME we’ve set a launch date, so anything else you’ve heard is false. We will not be charging any kind of fee for anything, and the new site will NOT include banners. We’re keeping things free.

The goal of this new version is to make things BETTER. Putting ads on the site isn’t going to make it better, now is it? Unlike the most recent updates to the site, the 2.0 updates are mostly front end. The biggest revisions are going to be to the overall design (the new design is KILLER!) as well as the gallery. We’re going to have subcatagories for Music, Movies, and Misc skins. Each catagory will have it’s own gallery. The galleries will also be sectioned off to a certain number of images per page so things load faster for everyone. Finally, there will be an option to search the site to find the page you’re looking for.

More soon.

Bob Marley is here!

As we set our sights higher and higher, we’ve become aware that a 2.0 launch of this magnitude is going to take a bit longer than a week. We’re still preparing a new line of movie pages (over half of which are done) and we’re working on new applications to load all the information we want into the page. We apoligize that the flow of new music themes has been slow since we began work on 2.0, but trust us – the pay off will be worth it.

Starting the day of the 2.0 launch, we’re going to get commited to serving up five new start pages a week. At first, most will probably be movies. Eventually, we’ll establish a healthy mix of our two current catagories and start to integrate a third catagorie a few months later. Whatever the mix happens to be, know that we’ll have atleast five new themes a week for you.

A design for version 2.0 has been finalized! 1.0 always felt temporary for us. The new design is sleek, it loads fast, and it’ll really make browsing the site so much easier. The main page will feature the top four pages, the newest four band pages, and the newest four MOVIE pages! We should have the site up some time this week.

We’ve finally finished the new gallery system. As with our last update, I suppose this doesn’t really effect our end users. By automating the system though, we’ve reduced the rate of errors and made it easier to add new pages to the site. This means we’ll probably start churning out new themes faster. There is a new URL to view the gallery: https://awesomestart.com/gallery/

In the next few days we’ll be sorting out the gallery to reduce the number of thumbnails per page. This will help us cut down on loading time, increase the overall speed of the site, and help browsing users find the page they’re looking for faster. Ultimately these changes will probably take place by the VERSION 2.0 launch.

In regard to VERSION 2.0 – We’re redesigning the main site to include more content. There’s a lot of pages our users don’t even know about that we want share. Like this one, to help promote awesomestart. We want to display the top pages, the newest pages, four random pages, and the first few sentences from the developers log. We’d also like to have a working log of the most requested pages and one of the pages currently in progress. Finally, we’re going to roll out eight or so movie themes to start our new line of movie pages.

Don’t think we’re forgetting about the music ones, though. The Pink Floyd page is now up!

Our new preferences link system is now in place. If you already have a page set up and ready to go, this shouldn’t affect you. If you click on the Preference link (by CUSTOMIZE: on your start page) you should be redirected to the preferences page as usual (this link is hidden to those who already have everything setup). The difference, however, is that the start page you just came from should already be loaded in the themes. We just thought it would make things a little easier as we get closer and closer to 100 pages.

It’s very important that you let us know if you encounter any errors! To report an error, just go to the contact page and tell us what happened. Maybe your “Click Here to Make Homepage” link won’t go away even though you’ve already set it as your homepage. Maybe a graphic looks funny or won’t load. Maybe the name in the title bar is wrong. Maybe you got a 404! In any case, just send us a little email and tell us what’s up. Thanks!