I have always found this a shame, especially because this site was for a part a reason for me to learn computers/internet/programming. (My very first site, 7 years ago, was a Julia Roberts fansite as well, it later changed to JRO) On top of that, it was just a waste of my #1 google & yahoo ranking which I have invested months, if not years, into - which resulted into a stable daily 1500 visitors and a mailinglist of 25K+. And as if that was not enough, there were still the fans that kept mailing me asking if the site would get updated again - I did feel really bad about that point.
After 5 years of running JuliaRobertsOnline.com (JRO) in a static format, it was time to take action. Beginning of this year, I run into Postnuke and successfully used it for one of my other projects (www.arubastation.com). Having seen what it can do, logically I quickly realized that this would be THE solution for JRO as well. Sure it has its flaws here and there (which CMS doesn't?), but nothing one can not master or 'bypass'. And so begin of this month I put my hands on it and as of last week, the site is back live again at
http://www.juliarobertsonline.com
I'm still working out some issues and a lot has to be added, but so far I'm happy with the result. Both design- as technically wise. Adding or updating content takes maybe 1/10th of the time it used to and at least now I can pull the (registered) visitors back to the site.
The site now gets approx 2500-4000 visitors a day and performance wise behaves just fine so far. We'll see what will happen when the database gets bigger ;) because we are getting approx. 30 to 50 new members daily :)
A special thank you goes out to my wonderful girlfriend, which helps me out with the content and without who the site would still be the way it used to be...
YAPNS!
Stepan Hluchan,
JuliaRobertsOnline.com
(stepan at 3amp dot com)
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