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Before we say anything else, we wold like to announce that OUR NEW SITE DESIGN IS FINALLY COMPLETE AND LIVE! We hope you love it!

Flashback to our Chinatown Scavenger Hunt in east LA circa 2011. We had a list of tasks, absolutely no way of understanding the language, knew no one and it totally rained on us (1 of 2 days all year!), but regardless of all the setbacks, we were determined to make it to the finish line and do everything right along the way (no iPhones) – and you know what they say about karma – we did not want to end up like whatever this was below. You may want to shield your eyes and scroll down an inch or two if it’s not already too late…

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So, how do Chinatown and chicken feet relate to our vision? Well, when it came to redesigning our website (woo hoo!), a crucial step on our path to becoming hardcore adventure journalists, it felt like we were in a completely foreign country. Swimming in a virtual sea of CSS/ HTML and hosting platforms that we didn’t understand, without a soul in the development world to turn to and we experienced more than a few stormy days that made it hard to believe that we would ever find our way to the finish line. And the chicken feet? Let’s just use those as a metaphor for some of the web developers that we met along the way, tasteless and virtually not good for anyone. Luckily, there were things like fortune cookies and good luck gongs to balance things out:

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When it comes to web design, trust us when we say pay for quality work from the start. You may remember this post from back in March… we spent a year trying to work with others before realizing that it just wasn’t working and we were going to have to figure it out on our own. At this point it was as if we had been living in the foreign land of web development for a year and so were able to figure out just enough to tic the items off our design “scavenger hunt” list.

And just like this bowl of “meat” soup that Drew ordered…

…there were some good things, some not so good things and many unidentifiable things that we encountered. I should also mention that while Drew is known to eat anything (blood sausage even) he was not able to take a 2nd bite of this soup, and I seriously think that the photo above sets him into convulsions… but what’s most important is that we learned what did and what did not work for us, ultimately allowing us to find the tools we needed to build our site and pave the bright, sometimes slippery, path that continues to lead us towards our dreams.

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Looking for some inspiration of your own? Check out Drew’s latest video, highlighting some of the best moments we have encountered along the way. This will also serve as our featured video at the top of the side bar in the months ahead!:

What is your great vision? Name it, write it down and do something about it. It is worth the time it takes and you are capable.