Website Changes?

I was away on holiday last week (hence the lack of posts over the last 7 days), and as always it gives me a time to do some thinking (although not so much since we had the kids). One of the things I've been mulling over for a while was to do with changes to my site, particularly as I'm nearing the 1000th post mark.

There are various factors which are making me think about some changes. First and foremost is the fact that as the blog gets bigger and bigger it becomes harder and harder for people to navigate. Then there's the growing number of posts per label, making it harder still to find earlier posts for some of the more popular films. There's also the question of screen resolution. When I last changed my template (I'm still on a modified version of an original blogger template) the screen resolution on my laptop was only 800x600, now both of the PCs I use regularly are over 1250 pixels wide, meaning a lot of useful space is wasted. Lastly there are a few good reasons to have a dedicated domain name, Wikipedia could link to me for example, I'd have a simpler domain name and I could do certain feature pages that I could do whatever I want with, plus I could actually join the 21st century.

But there are downsides as well: redesigning anything would be a lot of hard work; moving the site away from blogger would make me less visible on Google, and potentially lose me the labels; there's a small cost implication; any changes I made would need to be fairly future proof, not just cover all the bases now; and on top of that there's my general discomfort with changing something that, in general, works reasonably well, particularly as there's a frighteningly blank sheet-ish-ness to the possibilities a new site offers. It might be possible to marry blogger with an independent site, but what happens to all the links etc. etc..

So I thought I open this up for ideas. I believe there are a few regular readers of this blog and I'd be interested to hear from them or anyone else who's just passing through. Do you have any useful experience I can draw on or any advice, feedback, ideas or suggestions. Which parts of my sidebars do you find most/least useful? How do you find navigating the site? Are there any other sites you're familiar with that might provide a good template? Any advice you offer would be most welcome.