Recreating Our Site

It's been a while coming, but our site has had a revamp. And goodness knows I've been harping on about doing something for ages.

There are reasons for needing a change:

• Wordpress was becoming more and more difficult for us to maintain due to lack of time and general bugginess of plugins we'd used
• It seems ridiculous that our site couldn't be accessed via mobile when even I preferred to browse the web through my phone while sat on the sofa
• Over the last decade or so, our community and identity has matured, so I think we're comfortable being who we are now: a small group of friends who love to play Animal Crossing.

That being said, it is important that we maintain a level of openness with new visitors, and that means allowing curious browsers the space to see what our little group of gamers is all about, and join in if this is exactly the sort of place they've been looking for.

So after some mulling over since the New Year, I've decided to switch to a more traditional website layout, and opted for the simplified Google Sites / Blogger layout which works really great on mobile devices as well as desktop browsers.

Forum Facilities

It does mean the forum on the old site will be (and has been) archived, but I think seeing how there hasn't been news of a new Animal Crossing game for some time (I'm holding my tongue on the mobile version), a forum right now isn't really a big deal for us. So I've integrated with this site the original Google Group which allows people to either view posts while signed in from here, or receive posts by email and respond that way, too. I believe that is a fairly flexible way to operate any discussions.

Photo Facilities

And it's worth mentioning the Flickr group which has been around for aaaaaages. Visit it again here if you like. :)

Chat Facilities

Personally, I've met a lot of wonderful people through ACUKE and they've become very close friends of mine. But, as is life, people move on from Animal Crossing, but that doesn't mean we've not been keeping in touch via Facebook, WhatsApp, or Skype.

Last year the ACUKE WhatsApp group appeared where the closest of my ACUKE buddies and I joined in, and following the Welcome Amiibo update, it has been a fairly steady place for casual conversation and keeping in touch.

It worked rather well last night, when a few members got together for some Tortimer island games. An hour of fun goes a long way to reminding us why we love Animal Crossing so much. :)

However it didn't give us the structure we needed for active game chat. So we now have our own dedicated Discord app chat server which can be accessed here (you can also see the widget on this site).

So I'm going to be slowly updating this site and inviting existing and new ACUKErs to send me an email via mayor@acuke.com with suggestions and/or requests.

Will update you again soon!