It has taken a long time to put together. Some people might like the older website better (I don't ) and some this new one.
The old website has been with us for Anime 2006 and 2007 and before that we had a 'static html' website for Anime 2003 through 2005. Both designs were a bit 'black', with white text. I kind of like(d) that. But the older design had more color than the previous one. I realised we needed that color again, but wanted something 'lighter', so instead of black it's now a white background. Other design elements are friendlier round corners and outlined text buttons for the main menu-items. Submenu-text can't easilly be rendered as such because of the dynamic nature of their function in the Content Management System (CMS). Navigation was also addressed, as the former design wasn't actually meant to support the info it was holding. This resulted in problems with logical content placement. This time we have a more logical navigation.
This site now uses a new core version of the CMS which offers a lot more technical features and possibilities. We will also develop this site more than the previous one. One of the first things will be RSS-feeds of newsitems. But besides the technical possibilities we will add more graphic material, provided by artist Mike Kok, who did a really great job on the icon drawings. They were animated by Martijn from our sponsor synthesiSFactory, which also designed the website and implemented it in their CMS.
For the time being the forum will sport the old color scheme, but within a month or two I'll change that to something befitting the new website's look and feel. Before that I'm going on a holiday and after that I'll probably too busy with final preparations for the Anime 2008 festival. The site as it is now is functional, but I'll continue to refine it when I return from my holiday as well.
So I hope you all appreciate the new website and the amount of work that has been spent on creating it. And I do appologise to my fellow staff members for running behind schedule a lot.