The Humble Beginnings

Freakin’ Sweet News was launched on the 24th March 2008 by Brian Byrne.

Brian had been studying web programming (XHTML, CSS, PHP) as a part of his college degree that year, and decided to use his newfound knowledge for something that greatly interested him: Family Guy. He purchased a hosting provider and a domain name in January of that year despite having only a basic knowledge of one of the simplest forms of website coding, HTML. It’s really no surprise that it took such a long time to finally launch the website: a total of 60 days from purchase to unveil. His less than perfect designing skills at that point left him with no option but to pay for the website’s first design.

Hurricane Content

The next step Brian focused on was simply whoring the website out with as much content as he could create. While it was his intention to include things that you’d see on any and every fan website, such as episode guides, character guides and icons, it was also his intent to give the website a hook by including pages you wouldn’t find anywhere else. This drew in more visitors than ever, and cemented the website’s name in the animated tv website community.

Another Layout, and Another, and Another…

As the site’s popularity slowly grew thanks to advertisements on YouTube and some popular forums, regular design changes followed. In the 6 months since the site’s opening, the website went through a total of 6 layouts, an average of 1 layout per month. It can and was argued that this was overdoing it a little. Still, the standard of Brian’s designing skills seemed to steadily improve with every new design, so perhaps all these changes were a good thing.

A New Generation

In April of 2009, Freakin’ Sweet News made the inevitable transition to WordPress, combined with a complete overhaul of the website. With the functionality of this extremely efficient and useful CMS, we were able to implement user registrations, image galleries, searchable categories and tags, staff expansions and more.

Expanding the Community

In late June of the same year, we lanched the Freakin’ Sweet Forum, which would replace our outdated discussion page once and for all. The forum featured sections for Family Guy and The Cleveland Show. An American Dad section was also added so the forum could be linked from the new American Dad sister site, American Dad News. The forum was an instant success, with over 3500 posts made in the first month alone.

MERGE!

Late August saw the biggest change to the website since it’s WordPress upgrade: the integration of American Dad News and Freakin’ Sweet News, together with the launch and integration of Cleveland Show News. With ADN originally a separate website, it was suffering from neglection. This gave Brian an idea, which came to fruition within days. It was decided that the 3 websites would be “merged” as one. While each website still exclusively contained news for each respective series, all now shared the one admin interface and database, which meant network-wide registration and membership, along with the new possibility to update each website from the one interface.

Designs

Link Us

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URLs

Freakin’ Sweet News is currently accessible via the following URLs:

• http://www.freakinsweetnews.com
• http://www.familyguynews.com

American Dad News is currently accessible via the following URLs:

• http://www.americandadnews.com
• http://www.freakinsweetnews.com/news/americandad

Cleveland Show News is currently accessible via the following URLs:

• http://www.freakinsweetnews.com/news/theclevelandshow

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