Today is GDA's 9th anniversary. Nine years ago today Courtney launched GDA 1.0, a variation of the site she had before called "Courtney's Green Day Page". Since those early days, we've grown into the site we are today, with a team of 16 editors, designers, volunteers, and moderators, over 100 pages of content, and we recently just passed 40,000 members on our forum.

Today we're happy to announce that we've begun work on a new layout, GDA 8.0. We're still in the middle of design, and it has a ways to go, but we have a small preview to show and a few highlights to share. Things will change before we launch, but you'll get an idea of what we're doing.

[newsImage]071110_gda_8_preview_th.jpg[/newsImage]The goal we started out with was to simplify navigating our content, and tying related sections around the site together. We're dropping the "3 column" layout, opting for 2, with a navigation bar at the top. This means we have more space to share content, and more room to work with. When I talk about "tying related sections" together, an example will be when you visit a band members page (let's use Billie Joe as an example) - not only will you see his bio, but all the recent news entries just about him, recent photos in the picture vault, his quotes, equipment, wallpaper and other content related just to him. The same wil be done with other band members, and this idea will implemented across the entire site.

We have many other ideas we're working on to make GDA the best fan site out there. Not only the best Green Day fan site, but we want to build something better than anyone else has, and in the process we're going to update every single page on the site.

We've decided to launch this re-design in stages, rather than all at once, because of the large volume of different pages we have. So the home page will go up first (in 2-3 weeks with a few new sections), then we'll continue converting old pages to the new layout over the next month or two.

New design aside, I'd like to take this chance to thank everyone on the team who has helped make GDA a success over the past 9 years. We've had so many incredible people volunteer their time to making this place work, and without their help we wouldn't be here.

A sincere thank you to all our visitors as well. You guys have all played a part in making this site work and making it worthwhile for us to continue work on the site. Thanks to everyone who has contributed in some way, either financial help when we needed it, or participating in conversations, contests and submitting things to the site.

We look forward to being around for years to come, and continuing to provide the best place for Green Day fans to gather on the net.