About Our Summer 2008 Redesign

Those who are familiar with our website may have noticed a few changes we've recently made. At first, our intention was only to make a few visual updates. But it seemed that every time we updated a page, we saw something else that needed to be done. Here's a summary.

Site Location

Why are the page addresses different, and why are the old addresses still at the bottom of each page? Yahoo! announced that on October 26, 2009, GeoCities would close. Therefore, we either had to use their new hosting service or move our site elsewhere. We chose the latter, for reasons that we'll explain at another time.

Up to that date, we had always had our domain, gathering-place.org, as an address that redirected to the GeoCities location, because hosting at Geo was less expensive than hosting at a full-fledged hosting service. Since then, the cost difference has become negligible, and we've decided that it was about time that the training wheels came off.

Our new configuration is a full-fledged domain located on the hosting servers of the company where we registered our domain names several years ago. In this new configuration, the bottom of each page on our site will eventually show that it has a gathering-place.org address rather than a geocities.com address.

When this address address change is made on a particular page, the GeoCities logo is also removed. And because our site contains more than 100 pages, this is a lengthy process to complete, so please bear with us.

Page Content

Why has there been such a drastic change to the Helpers page?

We found that it's not in our best interest to define people in terms of a role. For our bigs in particular, this has been extremely limiting. We believe that it's healthier for us to shift the page's focus to the broader issues of helping in general and how teamwork and cooperation among all ages have benefitted us.

In keeping with this broader approach, we've moved our Helpers and Protectors pages to our Features section.

What happened to the exclamation mark after "Talk to Us"?

About 75 percent of us are introverts, and we believe that a more subdued approach to interaction with outsiders is more in keeping with our comfort level. We don't want to mislead outsiders into thinking we're more outgoing than we actually are.

Why is the "We Remember" tribute at the bottom of each page disappearing?

We believe that this tribute has served its purpose during the past several years and that the persons represented by the graphics would understand if we removed them. Also, with the GeoCities logo being removed from each page, the footer would look unbalanced with nothing on the left and these two graphics on the right. Placing one of the two graphics on the left would necesitate having "We Remember" on each side and would look awkward. Therefore, we are removing the tribute from each page as that page is updated.

Visual Design

What's happened to our border backgrounds?

Let's face it; left-border backgrounds are now passé. Most of the folks of MD aren't comfortable with change, but we take pride in our site and in our design skills. This site was originally alyssa's vision, and while we want to remain true to that vision, we need to move forward. For now, we've changed the pages in our Features section that had a left-border background. We may change some of the bigs and teens' pages, but plan on leaving the kids' pages as-is.

Buttons, buttons, who's got the buttons?

Another thing you'll see is our use of new, better-looking navigation buttons. We've finally perfected the art of buttonizing using Paint Shop Pro X2, and we're very happy about this accomplishment. We're now using updated buttons on current pages throughout the site; however, all old pages still contain old buttons.

Has anything else changed from the design standpoint?

Yes. To maintain a sense of consistency, we've also changed the color of our Helpers, Soothing Space, Disclaimer, Safety Policy, and Staying Safe pages to the sky blue of our Features section. The light-yellow backround and pansy border formerly seen on our Soothing Space page has been moved to our Bigs page, as it has always been their motif in the first place.

Also, we've added navigation bars to the top of secondary pages. We hope this addition will clarify the content structure of specific areas of the site.

Site design by

Original and adapted graphics by