Things were a little wonky this weekend as we updated the site. The creation of a new landing page (re: front page) has been on the list of things to do for awhile. Our goal is to make PFDebate.com much more than “Two Guys and a Blog”.

A few weeks ago Steve Smith from Ordered List announced that he was leaving his position as lead developer for the University of Notre Dame Web Group to begin doing freelance web development. Steve has been on our short list of potential web developers for awhile, but he was not doing freelance work. While the middle of the school year is not the ideal time to make major changes to our site, we felt the need to hire him before he was booked months in advance. We are very happy with the results and we hope you are too. What’s new?

• New Logo and Color Scheme. These are most visible on the landing page, but we plan to use them on other parts of our site.
• New Favicon. The icon next to the URL in your web browser should look like our new logo instead of a checkerboard. The old icon may be cached in your browser for awhile.
• New Landing Page. At a glance, you can see which areas of our site have been updated. We hope people will discover that there is more to our site than this news blog.
• New Identity. We are now PFDebate instead of PFdebate. This is one of the first suggestions Steve made and it is something that Patrick suggested when we first formed the LLC.
• New Search Engine. PFDebate Search has been replaced by DebateSeek. Instead of being limited to just Public Forum Debate, DebateSeek is a search engine for speech and debate websites. DebateSeek is definitely in beta. We have a large list of new sites to add and refinements to make, but since the DebateSeek search box is on the new PFDebate landing page, it is now live for everyone to see. Experiment with it and see what you think.
• New Payment Option. Until now, we have used PayPal as our exclusive payment processor. We are now accepting PayPal and Google Checkout. We will have more to say about this in the coming days.