Well I’m not sure what happened to the old website but over time the performance got worse and worse, it was harder and harder to edit and a couple of times it seems it was even under some kind of attack.  Plus I never really liked the last site design. Therefore I decided to rebuild the site, make it much better and move it to a much better web host.

The Name

I decided to change the name of the site for a couple of reasons.  I think JapaneseEmoticons.me sounds a lot better than the .net.  It’s more personal and kind of cuter and since the whole idea of this site is that you’re expressing yourself with Japanese emoticons I figured a .me address fit in with that idea better. Plus it was a lot easier to just register a new domain and use that to make the new site rather than try to transfer the domain to the new host and build a new website.  The old site would have had to some down and it would have been too complicated for me.

The Design

I’m a lot more proud of the way the site looks now.  I think the last design looked kind of amateurish and I was never really a huge fan of how it turned out.

The Web Hosting

The old company I was using to host the site was great but this site has grown to the point where it was time to move to a much higher end server.  The site is now getting close to 23,000 visits a day and I think a lot of what was causing problems before was because of the amount of traffic the site was getting. You should notice that the site loads a lot faster now.  On a speed test the new site scored a 98% while the old one scored only 78%.  That should make using the site a lot better. The new server is a lot more secure as well so that should help with any weird attacks or hacks or whatever.  That’s stuff I don’t really understand and with this new web host I don’t have to worry about it. The new hosting plan is a lot more expensive though which leads me to…

We Now Have a Patreon

I’ve set up a Patreon account for JapaneseEmoticons.me.  If you’ve enjoyed using the site for the last several years please considering funding us.  The revenue the site received from Google Adsense is way down over the last several months and the new web host is a lot more expensive. Even if you can spare $1 that would be a huge help and that would go towards helping us keep the site going as well as help with updates to the mobile apps. I really want to make some big updates to the mobile apps but that’s not something I can really afford at this point. I’ve put a lot of work into the site over the last several years so if you enjoy it please consider sending a few dollars on Patreon. Every little bit is really appreciated and I really don’t want to turn JapaneseEmoticons.me into one of those sites that’s just absolutely plastered with ads.

Conclusion

So that’s all I really have to say for this update.  I hope you enjoy the new version of the site and always remember you can suggest us emoticons and we’ll get them added to the site. ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ