Sharpened.net version 6 was my largest web development project ever.
It was the first website I designed in Dreamweaver since Adobe had stopped developing GoLive several years earlier. While it was difficult to move on from GoLive, using Dreamweaver gave me an opportunity to completely redevelop the website by hand-coding each page. While it might sound arduous (and it was), this method gave me more control over the exact appearance of each page and allowed me to create pages with much more efficient code.
Since I chose to hand-code the new site, I also decided to implement some brand new technologies that were not yet supported by WYSIWYG editors, including HTML5 and CSS3. While these Web standards are still not supported by all browsers, they offered great features that made it easy to structure page layouts and stylize the content of each page.
In November 2010, I launched the PC.net version 6, and it looked like this:
Over the next two years, I made a few minor revisions to the site, similar to the refinments software developers make to a major software release. However, the next big update was not a redesign, but a name change.
In May 2012, Sharpened.net became PC.net.
I purchased the domain name "PC.net" and rebranded the site. The new domain was a significant improvement over Sharpened.net, which was the first domain name I ever purchased — back in 1999. "PC" represented the site better, and it also happens to be my initials. The Sharpened Glossary became the PC Glossary.
Soon after, I added some breadcrumbs and previous/next navigation to the glossary definitions, file extensions, and several other pages.
The search box in the header was a bit lacking, so I added a cool search-suggest feature that searched the database for several different types of results, including glossary terms, file extensions, chat acronyms, and emoticons.
The Help Center remained one of the most popular sections of the website, but the fancy search-suggest feature didn't include Help Center results — something I would address in the next major website update.
Speaking of things that needed to be addressed, PC.net was a desktop-only site until 2019. TBF, the website looked OK on smartphones and other mobile devices. You just had to zoom in a lot, and it definitely wasn't "optimized" for mobile. In 2019, PC.net finally became mobile-friendly.
Surely, after a full decade, a full redesign was in order for 2020. Nope. The next major redesign wouldn't happen until nearly three years later, in October 2023.
