If you've looked closely at row2k over the past few weeks, you've noticed that we tweaked the site a little.  Our top nav now has dropdowns for the first time, in an attempt to get more of our stuff visible more easily to our readers.  Up until this point, there wasn't a surefire way to directly access all of the interesting content on the site.
 
"Design" has always been a loose concept for row2k.com (see the picture timeline above for a few gnarly examples of the site, going all the way back to 1997).  While the driving concept has always been "most important stuff at the top," there have been a few key things that have run through all "faces" of row2k, back to times primeval.
 
The front page, the "Daily Update" is hallowed ground for row2k; this is, has been, and will be the most important page on the site.  Over the years, the "DU" has seen only a few minor changes, and has been joined on the front page variously by the Random Image (since '99), then the beloved, dearly departed "riffs" from '97 to about 2005, the "Features" space above the DU (2004) the "Picture of the Day" (since 2007), and the latest addition, "Video of the Day," since 2011.
 
Pretty simple, right?  Since row2k's beginnings, we've managed to hold on to the core idea of keeping the site about the rowing, without letting the "design" dictate too much how the rowing is shown. 

Even as we make the bigger changes, we try to keep working on little improvements that can make the site more readable, engaging or fun.  However, making even small changes can be "interesting" and challenging when working to update a 17 year old website without losing or wrecking anything; there are over 700 feature articles, 13,000 results and almost 350,000 rowing photos on row2k at this point, and making sure that all stuff is available, not only the newest material, is always part of the calculation.

Oh, and we've survived the dot-com crash, two recessions, three presidents and 4 Olympiads without ever having a Flash-based photo gallery on our site.