The design of both of these sites are preserved on archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120227005509/http://place.thewilloftheancients.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20140401033457/http://art.thewilloftheancients.com/
If I recall recorrectly, the uniqueness of their designs was the main reason for keeping these sites around (rather than putting their content on TWOTA). But archive.org preserves the design.
We could add screenshots to the Website Screenshots section and link to these archive.org versions for posterity.
A bit of history: both sites have been abandoned by their creators and full control handed over to me. For a while I have been considering adding the content from these sites to TWOTA and then closing them. The reason for this? In order to make the Panzer Dragoon archive more accessible for visitors, it’s easier if all all the content is accessible in a logical place on The Will of the Ancients (especially if we add a search engine to TWOTA in the future). For maintenance/backup purposes it’s also simpler just to run one site.
Since I’m in the process of moving the Panzer Dragoon sites anyway, this is a good time to decide. Unless there’s a good reason not to, I will probably go ahead with the merger plan.
Edit: I have made this topic public in case other community members wish to provide input.
Are you saying you can keep the old sites archived but add their content to the current site?
I’m not a fan of linking to external sites for posterity, as you never know when those archives will disappear. However, as you want to keep the new server clean I don’t really have a problem with it, as long as all the content is moved over and the Screenshots / About pages are updated properly.
The Internet Archive (archive.org) is a non-profit organisation that has been around since 1996, so I’d say the organisation is fairly solid. The main issue is that their archiving method is somewhat flaky, especially when it comes to grabbing images. You’ll see if you look at The Art of Panzer Dragoon that some are missing. However, if images were added to TWOTA we wouldn’t be losing any, and the site design would still be preserved on The Internet Archive.
The old sites are already archived on the Internet Archive (see links above). The content would just be moved to the main site at thewilloftheancients.com, the subsites such as art.thewilloftheancients.com removed once the content has been moved across.
@legaiaflame has just moved The Panzer Dragoon Saga Oasis to the free hosting for static sites on GitHub Pages (upon my request):
http://pdsoasis.github.io/
I guess if one of you guys wanted to run The Panzer Place or The Art of Panzer Dragoon yourself as a seperate site on GitHub or another host you could do that. For me, I’m personally only interested in maintaining one Panzer Dragoon site going forward. It keeps things simple. I like simple.