Every now and again someone sends me a link to something at AAL. The site has its moments every now and again, but I don’t really have time to check it out every day so I tend to rely on kind souls out there who send me a link when there’s something interesting happening. Long story short (this isn’t even related to AAL), in reading some articles I noticed mention of a lot of other ‘theme park’ sites, which all seem to be adopting the “Entertainment” monicker.
About three years ago I adopted the name Total Thrills Entertainment as a parent of sorts for the newly created Roller-Coaster.com.au. The intention was basically to have Roller-Coaster.com.au as the main online presence, and Total Thrills would be the name given to other related ventures such as print media (calendars, magazines etc.). This way the existing strong Total Thrills brand could be morphed into something different. This idea soon died because ultimately it makes more sense to concentrate on strengthening one brand when it’s in its infancy as Roller-Coaster.com.au was at this stage.
I find it funny that this naming has been so universally adopted. The difference was when I chose to use that name, it was really about creating a new image for a well-established brand it so that users weren’t confused by the change. I know it’s all about trying to impress people enough to make them join the site so they’ll play their little game (Super Professional Coaster Site Madness 3000 is out now by Milton-Bradley; buy the deluxe edition and get the bonus E-Z-Fun Press Release-o-Matic Printer Kit). Here I was thinking that reputable and high-quality content was what drove people to sites. I really do have a lot to learn.
I finally got the site’s menu looking right in Firefox. It was one single line of CSS that needed to be changed, but I didn’t get around to it until now.
A month or two ago we changed from a table-based design to a DIV-based layout. There are still many tables throughout the design, but I’m slowly getting them replaced with DIVs, which are much more intuitive to design. It also meant that all design elements are shifted to CSS (when I introduced the current design we were about 90% CSS-based) making it much easier to completely change the site’s overall template.
Along with this change was the conversion of the site’s menu from paragraphs and breaks to an unordered list. If you now look at the site without CSS it looks much better than it would have previously. This is great for accessibility as people accessing the site on mobile devices etc. can get around easier. You’ll also notice our Other News section uses a list as well. User Opinions, Forum Posts and Press Releases will also be converted to this in the future (early next year).
As far as I can tell the site now looks 100% good in Firefox. Firefox accounts for 15% of our users, so obviously it’s pretty important that it looks correct. Internet Explorer accounts for 80% — naturally it’s the first priority, no matter what your opinions on it are.
As I’m sure most of you are aware we’ve got the Roller-Coaster.com.au Subscribers DVD coming out in the next few weeks. All editing was completed a while back, so it’s a matter now of compiling the individual segments into a DVD.
To rate myself for a second, what I love about this DVD is that it is totally unique from any other coaster videos out there. I have always had a love for classic 16mm surf films. The goal with this DVD was to capture some of the vibe of surf films but in a theme park setting. It is something I have wanted to do for a few years now so I have been mulling over a lot of different concepts and techniques, which can be seen in action now in the film. If you haven’t seen them yet check out the Videos page where you can view a few of the segments from the film. In the end it’ll be around 50 minutes long.
The first priority is getting this DVD out to the subscribers who have paid for it. December for me is pretty much out and about. Between a in regional Victoria for a festival and a week up at Woodford for their annual festival.
Back to Roller-Coaster.com.au, regular visitors will notice I try to get new features or modifications to the design happening all the time. In terms of design Roller-Coaster.com.au has reached a point where it’s not going to change too drastically at any stage in the near future. The challenge remains to bring greater user-friendliness and bring improve (slowly) web compliance. This won’t happen at once, but gradually within the existing design.
I also have another (unrelated) website which needs to be launched before the end of the year, and real-life work to attend to. As such things at Roller-Coaster.com.au will be pretty quiet for a while.
You can of course expect the usual regular news articles and, if time permits, construction updates. There are of course going to be some pretty exciting things happening over the coming month or so at the Gold Coast parks, and like usual we’ll be there to cover it.
In January we can expect some more drastic changes as work can once again resume on the ongoing development of Roller-Coaster.com.au. There will be some new minor and major changes coming. For proprietary reasons I’m not going to go into any detail at this stage but stay tuned.
I hope to make the subscriber DVD available to non-subscribers in the new year as well. This’ll depend on a few things, but I expect to be able to offer it to anyone who wishes to purchase it for a very reasonable amount.
What is the purpose of this blog?
Simply put, it’s to allow myself, Richard Wilson, as well as other key staff at Roller-Coaster.com.au an opportunity to express various issues that are relevant to Roller-Coaster.com.au. We’re not trying to be another satirical news source (there’s other sites out there for that), this is just an opportunity for us to speak on various issues without being represented officially under the Roller-Coaster.com.au brand. I’ll try and get it looking a bit better over time.
In coming months there will be some minor and major new changes to come into effect at Roller-Coaster.com.au. Some affect the end user (yourself), others are behind-the-scenes things that will improve the ease at which we are able to report on the latest happenings in the Australian theme park world.
One thing that remains consistent with Roller-Coaster.com.au is that we don’t offer the world. We never will. Roller-Coaster.com.au has a single goal. Just one. We aim to provide unbiased news and information relating to the Australian theme park world. I’m sure you may have realised by now that this is exactly what we do, and we don’t profess to anything more.
Notice this doesn’t say “we aim to be the best Australian theme park website” or “we plan to revolutionise the theme park industry with x, y and z (z comes in the next version though)”. I feel that we’re seeing people get swept up in a non-existent race of the coaster sites. Simplicity is the key. I ask how does one expect to be able to operate at the most fundamental level if they’re too busy getting swept up in competition?
Every time a websites says something like this, it encourages others to go one step further. I’m in a position where I don’t visit other theme park websites regularly so I don’t really keep up on the ins and outs of it all but no amount of “my site is bigger than your site” will trick a visitor into becoming a loyal visitor - at least not for long. Ultimately they’ll go where the content takes them.
We’ve even had reports of websites lying and misrepresenting themselves. I’m certainly not going to get involved in such heated topics which aren’t at all relevant to myself or Roller-Coaster.com.au, but it really is up to the visitor to decide what they will and won’t accept in a website and a webmaster.