A number of issues had led to this point, a number of which include administration, but it was widely agreed that the car scene in general has just “moved on” with life, and people just have higher priorities now.

So I put it to the people, what can we do to turn the community around? This led to something like 200 replies, most of which seemed to be quite helpful and full of good suggestions.

As part of that, I sent out a mass mail advertising the discussion, and numerous Facebook posts to try and drive some traffic to the discussion. This seemed to work pretty well at getting people back! The talk of progress seems to have brought a lot of users back on to the forum, who had otherwise moved on with life.

Our Google Analytics report shows a massive jump in traffic over the past 2 weeks!

Moving forward, there’s a lot of stuff I’m personally working on, and I’m pushing hard on the community to help out. A number of people who have offered to help in the past have continued to stick their hand up, but in addition to that, more people seem to be interested in helping to bring CB back to life. Hooray!

Shortly after, I had a great phone call with Rick White of EFI Performance. Rick is heavily involved with the forum CalaisTurbo.com.au, and had a wealth of good ideas. The most notable and acted upon idea, is re-introducing our “Feature Ride” articles. These were a big hit last year, but due to a number of issues, were cut short. The response from the new “Car of the Month” idea has been pretty inspiring. Previously, the moderator team helped decide who the next month’s feature would be, but the new plan is more involving of the community, by asking them to nominate the car they think is worthy. From there, a poll was posted and everyone has started voting.

I have also mitigated the risk of feature articles not being produced by the team, by ensuring people are interested and available to help out. I’ve tasked one of the members with writing a feature article for one of the nominated cars already, with about 3 weeks to spare, and he’s jumped to the mark quickly (not that I’m surprised, he’s a good bloke). I have also lined up 3 separate photographers to shoot the car, so the article should be brought together pretty quickly.

Most importantly, the production of the article is now alot simpler. Previously, Jamie Woods (www.digitalemu.com.au) put the article together in Adobe InDesign, which resulted in a highly graphical and creative production, based on the ideas from my original one off feature articles a few years ago, which were essentially 2 page feature articles published in PDF format, so people could print them out as a real magazine article. The original articles had alot of positive feedback, but the time and resource of doing this solely resulted in only two articles being created by me.

This time around, I’m looking to put together the article in a simple linear format, based on the same kind of layout as Speedhunters.com. I’m currently working on a WordPress installation to integrate with our Invision forum software, to present the articles in a blog format. The idea behind this is we can export the RSS feed to Facebook and Twitter, whilst allowing us to have a straight forward, manageable and “pretty” system for our articles, and any other content which may be introduced later down the line.

In addition to implementing WordPress, I need to migrate the current front page of the website into the new WordPress layout. At present, I have a custom coded page layout pulling data out of our forum database to display the latest threads, photo threads (i.e. readers rides and event photos), and Youtube videos. I initally wrote this around 4 years ago, and it has seen 3 or 4 website re-designs since then. It’s proved to be an important page for our users, as it shows a good overview of the forum and what’s going on at any point in time. The photo threads showing on the front page of the website was a key factor in my initial design 4 years ago, as it had to compete with what Boost Cruising was doing also. We realised that photos are what people want to see, and showcasing that on the front page was the best, most effective way of doing this.

Getting photos on the website is another issue entirely. We used to have a number of people who would take photos regularly and post them up on the website. Due to people’s ego’s, people leaving, or people generally thinking they had become pro photographers and not wanting to contribute anything just for the pleasure of contributing, we naturally ended up with practically no one posting photos. This still has to be improved. To start with, I announced a photo competition, a simple way for people to feel involved, and get a little bit of pleasure out of doing it. Oh, heck, I even offered a $100 prize to the winner. This got a few people posting pictures up, so good start. Next, I needed to get more established photographers on board. A quick post on Facebook resulted in two photographers offering their help to come out on cruises and events to take photos, which they have already delivered on. I guess the next part is getting the photographers to stick around, encouraging them to keep taking photos and posting them up. Some way of recognising their input will need to be established, and I hope to somehow repay them later on down the track.

Which brings me to sponsors… Rick mentioned yet another great idea to me here, as well as reviving an old idea which was acted on a few years ago. Back when we had some older members around, one of them hosted a “technical” day at his home workshop, where we all rocked up, had a BBQ and had some technical discussion around car modifications and what not. The day was a bit of a success, with some 20 members or so coming along. We’d like to start this up again when sponsors come on board, as the result is two fold – our members get to go to your workshop and have a look around, and learn a little bit more about car modification, and you get to show them around your workshop, essentially face-to-face advertising and building a bit of a trust relationship.

The other idea Rick gave me was video production. I have got a potential sponsor interested in this already, who I pitched the idea at. What I’m keen to do, is basically produce a video for the business, taking the public into the operations of it and showing them what the business does. For say, a workshop that does fabrication work, we’d go into the workshop, and show the processes involved in fabricating something, like an exhaust or roll cage, whilst interviewing the people who work there for a bit of commentary. Not exactly ground breaking stuff, but hey, it’s essentially a TV production advertising your business, albeit on the internet.

There’s alot of work to be done, and I’m truly committed to making it all work. I have a number of people backing me and it’s really looking positive. Whether it works or not is the question, but I’m optimistic that with the right people, it can turn around and we’ll be able to start doing the things we always wanted to with the community, like track days and stuff… Good luck me!

Clearly, these are arranged in ascending priority…