Let me first throw out a couple excellent quotes to get you in the right frame of mind:

He who rejects change is the architect of decay.  The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.  ~Harold Wilson

Growth is the only evidence of life.  ~John Henry Newman

Ahhh yes... change. Adapt or die. That is the subject that has brought us here today my friends. No doubt those of you who are familiar with our site has already noticed that we now fly our geek flag under a new name here. To some this has come as a shock, to others it was a natural progression for us, to me it was necessity realized long ago. So why the name change? Why switch from the PimpRig name you have come to love to a less controversial and much more general audience friendly name like PCApex? Well, before I dive into the "why" portion of this article let me first give you a little insight about where we have been. A peek at the journey leading up to PCApex.

In the beginning...

About 5 years ago I was working as an advanced tech support agent for the soul-crushing employer known as Comcast for their cable internet service. I was doing my usual surfing around my normal list of hardware review and gaming review sites planning out my next batch of computer upgrades when it dawned on me... Maybe I could create my own site with my own style and review hardware myself. This would help to satiate my endless thirst for the latest/fastest PC hardware plus save me a little money! While helping some poor soul reinstall their TCP/IP stack the name hit me... PIMPRIG! It was catchy, it described what we are about, and it was definitely a name right in the face of "The Man". I knew back then that the name alone would alienate some people but it was just too catchy to pass and every time I saw the site and the name it put a smile on my face. If even a small percentage of the tech enthusiast community had as good a sense of humor as me then I knew I would be good to go regardless.

After initially setting the site up using MyPHPNuke the site grew at an alarming rate and in no time there was a group of regulars hanging out in the forums. Prior to creating this site I had graphic and html experience but not really any PHP experience so I learned as I went. During my learning process the website went through many different looks back then as our image continued to evolve. Here is an incomplete gallery of the different looks we have gone through.

Slashdotted

Before long we were topping my shared host's 20MB cap on monthly bandwidth. Shortly after Wixx completed his Caffeine Machine mod project Slashdot linked to the article and promptly brought our shared hosting server to its knees. It was at this point that I came to a crossroads. I knew that in order to make sure our site wasn't hit this hard again I had to get a dedicated server. Going from about $10 per month to $150 per month to keep the site running demanded some thought. It was obvious that we were growing even before the Slashdot post. I needed to decide if I was just going to let the site level off as it was and keep it as a side hobby or if I was to dive in head first and go for broke. As you can tell, I went for the latter since you are reading this today. :)

Making a decision like that is quite an undertaking if you truly care about what you are doing. You not only increase your financial responsibilities; you also want to make your fellow geeks proud. I set out to create a website that I would want to frequent myself. For the first 2 years PimpRig ran virtually ad free and any ads that were on the site were just as a thanks to the sponsors who kicked us gear to review. It was a hobby. I hit Google hard and read anything and everything I could about marketing, advertising, banner standards, web hosting platforms, and countless other topics I had no clue about. After all this time, only now can I say that I am getting a firm grasp on these areas. In short, running a high traffic site is allot of work and requires allot of study, tweaking, time, and effort.

Since we had a shiny new (new to us at least) server it was also time to leave the prebuilt CMS scripts. To code the new custom CMS I enlisted our own Vladimir Skoryk who was a long time PimpRig member. I let him know exactly what I wanted and he delivered in spades. To this day we run on the same CMS which is built heavily around vBulletin. Vladimir continues to tweak features and fix bugs and is even working on a new and improved update which should add some very nice features. (Stay tuned for that.) This also meant yet more site redesigns. I get bored easily, learned better layout techniques, and always had new ideas... combine these things and you get many different designs. I experimented with different ideas and color schemes for quite a while. I have a background in illustration so most of my ideas are in various sketchbooks I still have.