Weekly Letter: 080518

Sites like ours are a dime a dozen. They appear out of nowhere. Some flourish most whither.

What will make

one of the minority group of survivors? Three things:

A non-financial motivation to succeed
A core group of enthusiasts experienced in forums and with a vast range of skills outside of the automotive arena
The desire to continuously improve and invest in the forum.

Let's not touch on all of these individually but focus on today's thunder, the last bullet.

Unlike many sites that start as stores and add forums. We are first and foremost a forum. And again, unlike other forums primarily concerned with revenue and profits, our concern is member growth and retention through content. Take a look at our stats; particularly hours logged by Oztiks and myself. Most of these hours are not post related. The time is/was spent analyzing member activity and making adjustments on the fly. Sites typically don't adapt quickly enough or in anticipation of changing demographics or interests. We are doing everything we can to keep in step with our growing membership.

How much of the revenue goes back to making a site or forum better? I can't answer for us because we don't have a top line but very little comes back from others. We have decided that whatever we can afford and whatever can be offset by donations will be put back into the site.

Today, we are pleased to announce the following enhancements effective Monday (or earlier):

Server. We put in a new a server to improve speed of access. You should have noticed a substantial improvement last week. In addition the old server is now our primary backup and development site. We spend a lot of time offline here experimenting with ideas and tweaks. The ability to do with minimal downtime is a competitive advantage. A forum from the past went through a software upgrade last week. They were down for much longer than 'back in a few minutes'. Granted, it's not a fair comparison. We changed software, physical hardware and locations in less than five minutes.
Themes. A new theme with better navigation tools will be activated. Oz and I literally reviewed dozens, if not a hundred themes; some very pretty but dysfunctional, others functional but dizzying. In the end we chose one we could customize. We have both changed this one significantly both in terms of aesthetics and navigation.
RSS feeds. No more do we have to scan the web for relevant information. The home page will have feeds for all manufacturers and the brand specific boards will have their context-specific feeds. We have even more RSS related innovations in mind but those announcements will have to wait until we have a better understanding of their feasibility.
Gallery. We are not just offering a Gallery, but a feature packed Gallery. We would like our members to not have to use their personal sites to host content for CARfaq. We choose this particular galley because you can post directly from your albums in the gallery from within the edit dialog box!

So there you have it. Two weeks into our life cycle, we have taken a no-holds-barred approach to help us evolve into the premier luxury automotive forum on the net. Is this enough? No way. We will continue to innovate and ensure an unheard of member retention stat.

Thanks for being here.

Have fun and enjoy the ride!

Ohmster
For the extended staff at CARfaq.org

Weekly Letter: 080518

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