Board Representation

I'm going to use a one-dimensional array with border squares to represent my board, as described here:

http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/boardrep.html

0x88 representation seems to be the most commonly used, but I don't believe it's worth me using it. The different it will make seems minimal, and I would have to work with bitwise operations, which I'm not at all comfortable with. 0x88 representation is described at these links, as well as the first link:

http://diovo.com/2012/01/chess-programming-the-0x88-board-representation/
http://mediocrechess.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/0x88-representation.html

I can't really build a prototype for the board representation on it's own, I'd have to work out move generation first, so I can do something with it.