Your eyes don’t deceive you: this is a brand-new Pokémon Aaah!, built with your mind in mind!
If you’re just here for the TL;DR: I spent the past month completely redesigning the site from the ground up as part of a new one-year plan to bring some life back to this place. But if you’ve got a minute, I’d love to walk you through what this redesign means, and where we’re headed from here.
Why The Redesign?
One thing I’ve learned over 25+ years as an on-again/off-again web developer is that the internet doesn’t sit still. Tools come and go—frames, NewsPro, SSI includes, CSS, WordPress—but the goal has always stayed the same: make a site that’s easy to use and fun to explore.
Now this site has gone through its fair share of redesigns over the years, but ever since I relaunched it in 2012, it’s been stuck with the “Version 10” look. That worked just fine in the 2010s… but by mid-2020s standards, it was clearly waaaaay out of date. I’d known for a while that it needed a refresh, but this was something I’ve been kicking down the road for as long as I could get away with… and it wasn’t until last month’s Worlds 2025 in Anaheim that I finally decided to pull the trigger.
I have a full event breakdown coming soon, but long story short: while showing off my custom cards and sharing the site with folks, the feedback I kept getting was that the layout felt clunky and hard to navigate, especially on mobile. And at an event where everyone is browsing on their phones, that was a real wake-up call… almost of crisis of faith. So I couldn’t avoid it any further: it was time to rebuild the site.
But this wasn’t just about modernizing the look. This redesign is actually the first step in a bigger one-year plan to turn this site back into something fans actually want to visit again. I know I can’t compete with the scale of PokéBeach or Serebii.net, but I can make the best Pokémon Aaah! I can, and it starts here.
How The Redesign?
My main goal was simple: make the site easy to use and enjoyable on any device: desktop, tablet, or phone. I also wanted to make it fun to browse and poking around in. But above all, I wanted to keep its soul intact. Just because everything under-the-hood is modern doesn’t mean the design can’t still evoke that old-school early-2000s design philosophy. Frankly I didn’t want the site to become another casualty of the “dead internet theory”.
As a reminder, here is what the previous versions looked like… this design has been a part of this site for decades so I couldn’t just replace it!
I won’t go over every single change, but here are some of the upgrades I’m most proud of:
- The site now uses proper responsive design, so it looks good across devices (with a few minor formatting bugs still being cleaned up).
- The sidebar is now an accordion menu—easier to use, easier to browse. Or you can just expand it all, just as God intended.
- The sidebar design actually pulls cues from the original Version 4 layout (yes, the one with frames!), meaning it stays visible and scrollable no matter how far down you go.
- Social media links are now front and center at the top, with recent comments and updates moved to the footer.
- Many pages got reorganized and renamed, moved to more appropriate locations. But don’t worry, your old bookmarks will still work!
None of this is hot, innovated stuff… but that’s the point. The goal was to finally align the site with modern standards without losing what made it “Pokémon Aaah!”. There are still a ton of micro-updates to make (since many older pages weren’t built for this new layout), so I appreciate your patience while I squash bugs and smooth things out.
That said, as an example of how the redesign makes pages look easier to view on different screen sizes, check out my Ruby/Sapphire Lost Pokémon page:
Also: huge shoutout to everyone in the PA! Discord for their feedback and support while I was dialing things in. You all helped keep this from getting lost in the sauce.
So Now What?
As I mentioned, this redesign kicks off a one-year plan for rebuilding the site, and myself along with it. While I technically restarted regular updates back in 2019, the growth I’d hoped for never quite happened. Or rather, I never truly give the site attention it needed to properly grow.
One big shift I had to make was letting go of my old Web 1.0 instincts, back when I learned to build websites in a world before social media existed. Like, I was passively waiting to see if people would find my content, while not quite understanding that most growing communities have been actively cheerleading themselves on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Now this site—and its content are still king—but I’ve realized that I need to be a better messenger for it, too.
So here’s what I’ve got planned between now and Worlds 2026 in San Francisco:
- Daily social posts: stuff like “This Day in Pokémon History”, “Old PA! News”, site highlights, and so on… right now I just want to throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks.
- “Weekly Roundup” posts: I’m gonna hold myself to it this time! So general news, community spotlights, random thoughts… whatever’s worth talking about that week.
- Monthly page updates: once a month I want to work on a brand new page… deep-dive articles with proper research, old images, maybe even interviews. Something worth your time.
- Regular Pokémon TCG custom fake cards: this was my bread-and-butter back in the day, and my Worlds 2025 customs were my way of seeing if I still got it. I’d love to create new fakes every week… maybe even stream the design process?
Again, none of this rocket science… it’s just me being more willing to properly invest into this site. Anyways, that’s the vision. The real push starts January 1, 2026, but I’ll be ramping up in the meantime: testing ideas, gathering feedback, and finding my rhythm again. Who knows how long it’ll take to hit full stride? The goal has been “Worlds 2025 to Worlds 2026″… but either way, I’m in this for the long haul.
Let’s Do This Together
This redesign isn’t just a fresh coat of paint for it’s own sake, but the the first step towards something bigger. I know the site hasn’t grown the way I’d hoped since rebooting it in 2019, but that’s OK… I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t, and brought myself into a situation where I had to sink or swim, and I choose to swim. So over the next year, I’ll be testing ideas, reconnecting with the community at large, and building something worth coming back to. Again, not to compete with the giants, but to simply make this site something special again.
So whether you’ve been here since the 1900s, or just stumbled across the site today, I hope you’ll stick around. I’ve got big plans, and if you’re reading this, you’re already part of them! Huzzah, good times!
