Surprised at our new look? So am I frankly. It was a long time in coming. Step inside and read more about this big change.

The old SCVTalk site ran on a bug-ridden “PHP-Nuke” software system for about a year and a half. Despite the bugs, it ran fairly well, especially during high traffic days, like the fires and other big stories.

But over time, it became infested with spam-bots and purveyors of ED medication. It was also difficult to read and manage, so I scrapped it in favor of a new, user-friendly, highly-customizable blog engine known as WordPress.

With WordPress powering SCVTalk.com, we’ll be able to bring even more writers and posters into the system. Commenting will be easier, and the layout of stories should resemble a newspaper’s website, which should limit how much scrolling you do. Accessing stories, videos, and comments will be a one or two click affair, compared with the old site which sometimes required several clicks to get where you wanted to go.

I’ve also slimmed down SCVTalk’s mission. Gone is the all-encompassing nature of the old website. You’ll find no photo gallery here, and, for now, no discussion forum. There’s plenty of this type of content regarding the SCV at major “Web 2.0″ sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Yelp.com, so look for information from those sites piped into SCVTalk.

SCVTalk’s new mission is to be the best SCV news and variety blog in town. The Daily Brief will return shortly after the new year and enjoy a prominent spot at the top of the website every morning. Other stories, opinion pieces, and humor pieces will also share space -permanently- on the front page of the site. Gone are the days of scrolling up and down to find a story- search on WordPress works exceedingly well.

All that said, there’s still a lot of work to do here. I plan to put some new icons on the website (much better looking than the old ones), coordinate the colors better, and put some more content on the front page. All this work will happen over the next few days and weeks.

I hope you’re as pleased with the look of the new website as I am, but get ready for more. Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting SCVTalk.com!