Today, August 11, 2016, is not an ordinary day in the life of The E Club. While it may seem so on the surface, an incredibly important torch was just passed: The E Club 2.0, hosted by WebStarts, has closed down, leaving The E Club 3.0 (what you're on right now) as the one true flagship of The E Club Family.
The E Club 2.0 was created with WebStarts on September 17, 2010 to replace its own predecessor, The E Club 1.0, hosted on Moogo. WebStarts caught my eye because of its unique drag-and-drop editor; at the time, I had little knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, so I had to rely on such a website builder to maintain the site. For quite some time, WebStarts was a great opportunity for The E Club to grow - with its flexible editor, a domain name, more disk space, and a variety of built-in features, I was able to expand The E Club and begin to unify The E Club Family, starting with the websites' subdomains of The E Club and new designs. But as my web design experience accumulated and time went on, I started to realize that WebStarts could not be the host of The E Club's future: its HTML editor messed up other elements of the page when I edited the code, it didn't exactly support new technologies I tried to implement, its blog tool was a glorified text editor, I had little control over the site's structure, there was no way to make the site responsive (everything was absolutely positioned on the page), and modifying the design through CSS was incredibly tedious. And WebStarts' problems were outside of the editor as well: prices rose for the same features, it charged $30/year for the domain that was formerly free, it wanted to charge for things as simple as submitting the site to Google, and when it promised a responsive design it didn't deliver (I would've had to make a new site in order to access it). In short, it was time for a change. And because of seven years of working on The E Club, I had the capability to do what I could do with a drag-and-drop editor with just plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So, on June 8, 2016, The E Club 3.0 on FastComet took the place of 2.0, and the rest is history.
Even though The E Club 3.0 replaced its predecessor at this domain (theeclub.info) on June 8, I kept The E Club 2.0 around for a little while on another URL to ensure the smoothest possible transition to the new version. Today, The E Club 2.0 has closed down, ending its era of stagnation on all fronts and firmly beginning The E Club 3.0's era of advancement on all fronts. But make no mistake - these are not two separate sites; rather, they are versions of the same thing. And The E Club 3.0, the best version yet, ensures that The E Club Family will lead a successful future.