You’ve no doubt already noticed there has been a number of cosmetic changes here at //StartupNews, and we hope that you, like us, think the site is massively improved by them.
This long-awaited revamp has been made possible by the amazing folks at Bam Creative, especially Miles Burke, Jessica Kaitse and David Thomas. They’ve done an incredible job of picking up the mess that I’d made of the site on its old hosting and turning it into this lovely work of art that you’re reading now.
//Startup News has been languishing a bit. Because it has never found a business model, it’s been hard to justify spending time on it. The community clearly needs it, or something like it, but hasn’t made as much use of it as we wanted.
Partly this has been down to how it looked and handled. So hopefully this revamp will make it easier and faster for everyone to use.
We’re also going to make some changes to the way we run the site over the next few weeks. The key changes we’re going to introduce are:
- Not so much Techboard content. //Startup News is happy to support Techboard, we think it’s a great initiative and will help grow the startup community. But we were getting feedback that Techboard content was getting too prominent, and now that Techboard have got their own audience and traction we can ease off on promoting their content. We’re talking with the Techboard guys about how to do this better.
- More community content. We finally have an editorial guidelines document, and we strongly encourage submissions from members of the community to submit
any old crapanything that they’d like to see published. We’ll still retain editorial control, but we’d like to loosen the reins a bit and see what the community wants to say - No comments. We’ll move comments to the Facebook page to improve visibility. We were getting about a gajillion spam comments for every real one anyway.
- Events page and newsletter. We want to make //SN the default community calendar, because the community needs one. This is going to take a bit of work to get all the events in there and updated. Please send us your events!
- Sponsored posts and advertising. We’ve tried this in the past, but it never really took off – too small an audience. However, we’re in the #ideasboom world now, so let’s see what happens. We’ll be experimenting with banner advertising and sponsored posts.
- Increased visibility of the donate button. The only business model that even vaguely worked for //SN has been donations. So we’ll be asking for more of that, please.
In terms of changes to the site, I’ll leave the good people at Bam Creative to explain the specifics in another post. But generally it’s about tightening it all up, removing unused features, improving the theme and responsiveness. Your experience using the site should be better, and finding things here should be easier.
We cleaned up the user list, too, because it was a mess. So if you had a login here but didn’t use it much, then it’s probably gone. We can reinstate it if you’d like.
And on that note, if you’ve got ideas for things you’d like to see on //Startup News, or things we “should be doing”, then please let us know. //Startup News serves the Perth Startup community, and we’re not changing that.
