It only seems like yesterday that I hit the publish button here at Aston Villa Central for the first time, but in fact it was a year ago today!! Yup, it’s AVC’s first birthday!! Wow, they grow up so fast, don’t they?

Technically speaking, I was only fleshing out a little content during December last year while I worked on the early design. I didn’t open the site up to search engines until January, but the first day of the year is a rubbish day to have a birthday, don’t you think?

The Story So Far…

It’s been a fun year. I initially experimented with a magazine style layout, but because it required a lot more effort to maintain and I was having performance issues I decided to swap to a simpler, more traditional blog layout as you see it today. The redesign did little to improve performance though, so I switched hosts early in the summer and haven’t looked back since.

Freed up to concentrate on content, I’ve been able to develop a number of regular features such as The Actim Top 100 Index, Salifou’s Weekly Round-Up and This Season vs Last Season. Hopefully there will be plenty more to come.

One of the main reasons for starting Aston Villa Central was to have a place to showcase the Aston Villa Wallpapers. I believe there’s around 40 desktop wallpapers available here in 1280×1024, 1280×800 & 1024×768 resolutions which covers 70% of visitors, although I notice that number is falling lately. I’ve been very pleased to be able to expand into Dual-Screen Wallpapers and smaller wallpapers for iPhones and Blackberry devices.

One of the functions that was important to me when I was thinking about how the site should work was the ability to tie associated posts together even though they fell into different categories.  So all previews, reviews, stats, videos, wallpapers, whatever that relates to a single match can be easily found in one place.  I keep links to the last 5 games and often the next game in the sidebar on the right.  Check out the Liverpool vs Aston Villa fixture for a good example of how this works and you should get an idea of how it will grow over time.  The same principle can be applied to competitions such as the FA Cup and Carling Cup.

One of the biggest disappointments for me this year was falling at the first hurdle in the Europa League.  Not only was it a tournament that I felt we could do well in which would provide some interesting fixtures, but I’d spent some time developing a dedicated page to help explain our path through the competition.  I’d no sooner uploaded it when I had to take it back down again!  MON’s Transfer page has proved pretty popular and I have some new pages in development that I think will be very well received here.

If you’ve been around much recently, you’ll know that I’m pretty proud of The Villa Wire.  I don’t mean to flog a dead horse, but not only is it satisfying to meet a technical challenge, but I genuinely believe it provides a strong feature.  I really do use it myself.  I have something similar in the pipeline which I hope to get cracking on very soon.  Stay tuned for that, it should be fun.

The Future

I haven’t had chance to produce as many videos as I would have liked this year, but I’ve recently started working on a new video project that I’m pretty excited about. It’s going to take some time as it will feature some 3D imagery I did a test for at the beginning of the Centre of the Universe video.

I’ve recently set up a Facebook profile so I’ll try to hang out there now and again. Send me a friend request if that’s your bag as it’s a great way to keep up to date with the latest posts if the other methods don’t yank your chain.  Whether you prefer Facebook, RSS, email or Twitter, hopefully I’ve got you covered.  I was dubious myself, but I have to admit that the emails are pretty nice – you should definitely sign up if you don’t like all this Twitter and RSS stuff.

I’m also excited about a future collaboration with Chris Nee of Two Footed Tackle on his Kwaitoball World Cup project. More details of that to follow, but in the mean time I can fully recommend checking out all the blogs in the Two Footed Tackle network and, if it isn’t already, the podcast should definitely be in your list.  It’s available on iTunes.

And Finally…

I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has stopped by the blog this year, especially if you come back now and again!! Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting and emailing me. Your words of encouragement really are appreciated. Thanks also to everyone who follows on Twitter, especially for the replies and retweets. I love Twitter, it’s so much fun and such a great way to keep in contact simply and quickly, especially on match days.

Hopefully, with your help, we can have an even better second year! Here’s to the future!!

UTV!!