Oct 20th, 2007
Empty rhetoric
Rules for launching a theme park website in Australia:
- Buy domain name.
- Design cool splash page promising the world.
- You’re 99% of the way there so take a few months off to celebrate.
- Delay it a few more months to really keep things interesting.
- Launch site and send out mass Personal Messages on Roller-Coaster.com.au telling members how much R-C sucks and how much better your site is.
- Live the high life with all the money and girls in the world.
I’ve had a few spare hours recently, in which I’ve made some very good headway on the development of the new site. It’s starting to look and feel like a completed site. The new gallery system in particular is great. It’s a really fluid and cohesive system that lets you seamlessly jump from photo to photo. You won’t need to click into a gallery. All photos tagged with whatever you’re looking at (be it Superman Escape photos, all Movie World photos, Superman Escape construction photos, Movie World publicity photos/artwork etc. etc.) will be listed by date added (newest to oldest). Doesn’t matter who took the photo, they’re all in there together. Any members can add photos so it’s easier than ever to stay on the cutting edge with construction. If you submit a photo, it will appear with your name underneath it, linking to your own profile page featuring all photos and articles you’ve had published on the site.
The site will be Australia-focused but the database has been specifically designed to cover parks and rides in any country equally. The fact of the matter is that there isn’t enough content available to keep things interesting focusing totally on Australia. We’ll cover international news to ensure that there are always fresh headlines. In addition we’ll open up the park database to cover international theme parks and feature photos from any park in the world so that anyone can put photos from their latest trip up. Of course if you only wish to see Australian (or US or UK etc.) content there will an option to easily narrow it all down.
The goal, essentially is to create a more enriching and dynamic theme park community and create a site where there’s something new to read and look at every single day.
(Oh, and I broke the above rules. The site was about 90% complete when I designed that splash image above.)