Magazines and Modifications

I was remeniscing with MelleMel the other day, about my early career plans, and how I wanted to become a graphic designer when I left school, but ended up a controls engineer instead. Ironically, I now do a fair bit of web design, but having missed out on a formal design background, everything I do design-wise probably takes me twice as long as it should, and perhaps lacks a certain flair. MelleMel on the other hand has just spent the past 12 years or so working in the print industry, and so has more of an eye for the way things look. She regularly keeps me in check by pointing out my errors with passing comments like "Roll up, roll up, for the Wheeeeeeel of fonts" (her description of the hidden page ear advert in the top righ hand corner).

Differences aside, somehow I've managed to rope MelleMel into helping put together the Ezine, for which fortunately she has lots of patience. The first issue has been a bit of a steep learning curve for me, as 've never done anything like this before. Sure I've written plently of articles, and published articles from others on web sites, but I've never dealt with more than one source before, and that's the crux of getting a magazine together - getting all of the articles in by a deadline to allow the magazine to hit the publishing date.

With the Ezine, the first issue has afforded us a bit of room to manouver, as we did not commit to a specific date, well we kinda had a date in mind, but this has long passed. With subsequent issues, we have a strict 3 month turnaround. Unfortunately we were let down with a few articles, which means that there is some coverage missing that we would like to have included, but we've decided to press ahead and publish, otherwise by the time we get the thing together, the articles we do have will be so far out of date, people will not want to read about them.

So, hopefully, some time this week, the Ezine will hit the web, and work on the next issue can commence.

Site Modifications

The site is slowly getting moulded into the community that we are aiming for. The competition is proving a great hit and has hopefully encouraged a bit more posting. We now have added Google maps functionality to our events section, which means that not only can we display a map of your local events on the front page, but we can also offer you turn by turn directions of how to get there. Simply type you starting address into the box on the events page and hit enter to open a new page up. We still have some more features to add to the events pages, such as events galleries and messages.

We have plenty more plans for improvements around the site, the next area to get a bit of a working over is the groups section, which will be receiving some added functionality in the way of it's own events section, comments and bulletins, allowing better communication between members. After that we will take a look at the profiles section and the blogs, adding further customisation features that users can incorporate. The idea is to try and provide everything that people want and need in the way of a VW community.

As usual, comments, ideas, suggestions - all welcomed.