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It’s coming up a year that I have been the UCR's Webmaster. So how have I found the experience? Overall it has been positive, but more work than I had expected.
When I started, I thought it would take a year to get the site where I wanted it, and this has turned out to be the case. I've had to battle a lot of bugs, and I have made a lot of subtle improvements. It helps that I’m a hands-on kind of person and love to root around in the source code. I enjoy looking through the pictures I get, and selecting those for the front page. Incidentally, every week, I put up 4 new pictures and remove the oldest 4. This may not seem like a lot, but that is still 200 photos a year. The photos are from Michael Coates, our Club Photographer, ones that I take myself, from UCR Classifieds and Galleries, and those people send me. As webmaster, I can get media passes, and with a media badge, pretty girls at events will pose for me, which is fun. I've gotten a pass for Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale for this January. I had a pass to the Las Vegas SEMA show in November but I couldn’t go due to family issues. Next Year!
Regrets? I developed the site using the then newest technology. I didn't concern myself that it might not display properly on older computers and browsers. Porsche owners would be a computer savvy lot, with the latest in digital technology, I thought. In recognition that I was probably being a computer snob, I recently released a simpler version of the front page that users can bookmark if the regular home page is giving their computer problems.
Disappointments? ...
I have found that it is difficult to get club members to submit content. I'm starting to think that there may just be too much competition out there for this kind of stuff. The other problem is that our forums have the person's real name. It prevents garbage, but stifles contributions. If you have something you feel should be published, but want your 'Name Withheld' please send it to me. Another surprise is that there is a lot more politics than I would have thought for a volunteer organization, but that's a topic for another day. Some emails I received blew me away...
Where do I go from here? There are still updates I still want to make, such as to make the site load faster. I might try just putting together a 'bare bones' site that strips out a lot of the formatting for superfast loading (the GT3 version). I sometimes wonder if I'm the right person to do this job. I'm usually the last person to adopt the latest technology. Twitter? What's that? So it will continue to be a challenge, which is what I was looking for in the first place.