As you can likely tell, we've redesigned the corporate Whiskey Media website. We did this for a number of reasons, but in the end we took on this project to accomplish two things. 
 

1. We wanted to host the site on our internal "Distillery" platform so that we could see how it worked on a smaller site.
2. We needed a better way to talk with the industry and our users about the cool stuff we're doing.

 
The first was pretty easy. We've spent the last three months on our internal tools and infrastructure so that launching a new site takes little more than a couple weeks of design and a few configuration options. With that comes a new 'lite' version of the Whiskey Media platform. The lite version uses the same core technology our other sites use, absent some features. When a site grows large enough, it's simply a matter of flipping a few switches to enable it with the same awesome features that come standard on our other sites.
 
The second goal will take an ongoing effort from a number of our staff members. We've always done a great job entertaining and interacting with our users but historically we've not been so great about telling them or the industry what we've been up to. That's going to change. We plan on using this site to regularly discuss new features we roll out and to provide insight into the decisions we made to get there. We're going to be talking about our business, technology, design philosophy, video production and editorial content here. We'll also have some of our power-users and moderators writing here as well. Expect articles on everything from priority lists of the bug queue to tutorials on Photoshop.
 
Mostly though, we just needed a place to answer the common questions we get all day; both from companies that want to work with us and users that are looking for advice on how to break into this industry. If you've got ideas for topics you'd be interested in reading about, please send an email to dave@whiskeymedia.com. But enough of that, let's talk about design and I'm sure your first question...
 

Who Builds a Brown Website? 

I guess I do. I've been building sites for so long that it's gotten hard for me to stray from the typical white or blue color schemes you find on most sites. Brown is something that just isn't used very often. However, brown is one of the best colors to lay our badass company logo on top of. It makes the logo stand out far better than the standard boring-white-corporate-drone website you're used to seeing.
 
I wanted to give the site the feel of sitting in the bar at our office, which is way, way too nice for the group of professional adolescents that make up our development and editorial teams. To me, the site evokes leather couches, shelves of exotic liqueur (or Dr. Zeaus), and a lights-out mood. The intent is to convey that while we may look like a bunch of idiots on video, everyone here is super professional and at the top of their game. And this website should reflect that.

We are User-Powered 

As part of the redesign I wanted a spot to show off the insane amount of community content that comes to us on a daily basis. Whether that's the artwork people send in, the videos they make, or Photoshop mashups that appear on our forums, I expect this kind of content and more to fill up the community section. 
 
I also wanted a place to show our actual user-base. Sometimes the Internet can be a fairly cold place and when we talk to other companies in this field, they tend to talk about "community" as some sort of unknown entity. Whiskey Media doesn't see it that way. Our community is made of real, awesome people, and they live all over the world. It makes me really pumped that when I asked for people to send in photos of themselves for this site I got not tens, but hundreds of responses. I'm sorry I couldn't fit everyone in, but I'll make sure that photo widget will update more in the coming weeks. 
 
Lastly, since this site doesn't come with the full feature set of our larger domains that our existing users have grown accustomed to, here's a couple notes for getting comfortable. 
 

1. Your Whiskey Pass will work on this site. To login, just use one of the links in the comment area and it should ask you if you want to create a new profile. Click "Yes," the left button.
2. Once your account is set up, you can change your avatar by clicking your the default avatar image you see next to your first comment. I know it's a little hokey for the moment, but it's our best solution at the moment.