What follows is a brief history of the various versions of Adventures of a GoodMan over the years through screenshots and descriptions…
Adventures of a GoodMan was born in December, 2004, as a hand-coded and designed photography site called Greg Goodman: Photography. It was barely updated until 2006, when I returned from living with my girlfriend wife in Nicaragua, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer.
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Greg Goodman: Photography was the precursor to Adventures of a GoodMan
Adventures of a GoodMan 1.0
Launch Date: Late 2007
After Carrie finished her volunteer service, we backpacked from Nicaragua to Mexico by bus. It was this trip that inspired me to add some of my favorite stories to the site and rename it Adventures of a GoodMan (special thanks to Meeks, who actually came up with the name). Finally, after months of work writing HTML in Notepad and designing the site in Photoshop, Adventures of a GoodMan 1.0 launched in late 2007.
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The first version of Adventures of a GoodMan
Adventures of a GoodMan 2.0
Launch Date: Early 2008
Over the next four years, I would tweak this design dozens of times and released several “final” versions. The next screenshot – version 2.0 – was mostly a graphical upgrade in an attempt to have better navigation.
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A new take on the home page in Adventures of a GoodMan 2.0
Adventures of a GoodMan 2.5
Launch Date: December 2008
When Carrie and I took another extended backpacking adventure to India and SouthEast Asia, I added a blog to post travel journals and photography from the road. While it was a huge step for archiving my work, it was completely separate from the rest of the site and difficult to navigate. Version 2.5 got a sidebar full of links to try and steer visitors towards the content I wanted to promote, but like the rest of the site the sidebar was hand-coded and I was very bad about updating it. It also featured my first attempt at integrating social media links into the site.
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My first attempt at integrating social media into the site was a small step, at best
Adventures of a GoodMan 3.0
Launch Date: April 2011
When I returned from SouthEast Asia in late 2009, I had an insane amount of content. The site, however, was not capable of handling it. I spent months trying to recode it and better incorporate social media before realizing that the time had come to get some help. That way, i could focus on curating the content rather than debugging scripts.
This was a huge step for me: someone who had always taken pride in creating every single part of my Web sites. But in the end, it was the best decision I ever made!
Read the full story of how I used freelancers from around the world to create the site of my dreams
