Last week, one of my most popular websites, Gator Envy, underwent some minor upgrades. Gator Envy was still running on vb 3.6.4 that I had installed 2 years ago. It was unstable and needed to be upgraded. Because my forum has a ton of modifications and plugins, I enlisted the help of the site’s designer to do the Vbulletin upgrade for me. The last thing I wanted was to screw something up and wreck the forum just before football season kicks off.

In addition to upgrading to Vbulletin 3.7.2, I also had the designer adjust the site’s width from 800px to 1024px. Not many people use 800×600 resolution anymore. Hell, even 1024×768 is almost out of style. I thought about just making the forum skin a fluid width, but really didn’t want to hamper the experience of someone with a 30″ widescreen monitor. Reading text across the entire width of a large forum can be tiring.

So all the upgrades and template changes cost me $100. It’s not a bad deal since I know I’m getting professional work and excellent customer service. Gator Envy now has over 1,100 members and nearly 30,000 posts. It should be a great year!