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.)
Nice job with the rules. I knew I was doing something wrong when launching my site, now I know what to do next time I am going to launch a new site.
Step 7: Ensure the splash screen is in the graphical style Apple uses in its advertising/website.
Very true… how could I leave that vital rule out!
Just a couple of questions;
-The image tagging thing sounds great, and I’m looking forward to that self uploading thing, It sounds like an original idea for a coaster site, and hopefully people will get behind and support it.
But if say you take a photo at a WVTP site, will all the user submissions have to be run past their marketing department, or will the fact it is a “user controlled” gallery be enough of a loophole so that it wont need to be done?
-Secondly, the coverage of International parks sounds good, but will it mean articles on the minor things to to with the Australian industry will be less covered as a result…eg Buisness dealings (Such as the SAG buyout), or will it just mean International articles will be in addition to the level of content we have? Hopefully the latter
-Will the forums remain the same? Will we still have our individual park forums and the international one?
-We won’t be running it any different to other community photo sites such as Flickr. If any organisation (WVTP or others) choose to take issue with the free publishing of photos by anyone then they’ll be very busy enforcing this across the board. I don’t anticipate a problem; think of it as no different to users uploading images in the forums.
-The aim will be to maintain the existing level of coverage of Australian parks and simply augment it with major International news (say when new major rides are announced etc.). In addition, I hope we’ll have individual nation-specific portals so that you can easily access only Australian/US/UK news.
That said, with reliance on international stories to keep things fresh, there will likely be less of a push to create news, and as such some of the more mundane issues probably won’t be covered. Something like the SAG buyout would always have a place on the site as it is pretty significant.
-The forums will, at this stage, remain the same. It will most likely become an issue down the track but basically in the initial launch we’ll be concentrating simply on bringing the new site framework to life and initially there won’t be a great deal of International focus.
The other thing I forgot to mention, what sort of standards will be in place for user uploaded photos? will they need to be of a certain size, quality, free of date watermarks etc…I imagine some sort of guide will be in place for this so people know what to do.
It won’t be strict as such, but there will be a set of guidelines as to what can and can’t be accepted. As an example, any “personal snapshots” will be flat out rejected. We ask that they’re of a decent resolution (say, minimum of 1024px wide) and free of watermarks and that sort of thing.
There will be a guide that appears the first time a user tries to add a photo that’ll make it so that everything is clear. The last thing we want is a user going to the effort of uploading a great deal of photos only to find we can’t publish them.
At the end of the day though we’re eager to accept any “good” photos from members provided they. We’re not like Flickr etc. where anyone can put up whatever they want, but from what little testing has been done so far of the system, it’s looking like it’ll work very nicely and hopefully encourage plenty of new content.
Sounds good, perhaps just a guide with examples of “bad” photos etc would work well.
I really am looking forward to this,
I have quite a few shots that could fit in nicely into existing galleries, but until now it hasn’t been worth bothering since it was usually just one or 2 photos of features not depicted in the gallery.
Exactly. The biggest issue at the moment is that the “Gallery” system really limits what goes up, as people aren’t going to bother viewing a gallery for a single photo, and I’m not likely to take the time to create a gallery for just one.
This’ll completely take that “gallery” step out of the equation and simplify it so that if you’ve got one photo to add then you can do just that and it’ll sort itself out and appear on the right pages.