I maintain a site for an annual event: http://abetterworldbydesign.com . Every year after the event, we struggle with the question of how to change the site to reflect an archive of the past year's event and focus on the content for the upcoming future event.
The site runs WordPress Multisite, which makes it easy to create a new sub-site every year. We have gone back and forth between:
A. Creating a new site for next year's event and moving the past event to a sub-site (e.g. http://abetterworldbydesign.com/2010 ) and providing an index of all past year's sites ( http://www.abetterworldbydesign.com/about-us/past-conferences/ ).
B. Updating the current site to reflect the upcoming year and capturing archive info from the past year on a single page ( http://www.abetterworldbydesign.com/2009/2008.php ). Here, the old site essentially disappears.
We have been re designing the site every year but don't want to have to do that going forward if we can avoid it, just for the sake of not reinventing the wheel.
If we continue to go with option A, how would we clearly distinguish the 2011 site from the 2012 site if they essentially use the same or a slightly modified WordPress theme?
More broadly, what is the recommended approach for this situation?