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Major Changes Ahead For U2Newzooland.com
Aug 26 2009 01:01 AM | Mike in Site News & Announcements
This website has evolved through various stages of its existence over the years (albeit somewhat slowly!), having originally started as "This Burning Desire" way back in October 1998. Five years later, on 31st August 2003, TBD was re-launched as U2NewZooland.com.
Across the ditch in Australia, Amanda Gilligan has been managing a U2 news blog and forum known as Lypton Village, which has been online for the last few years. While not strictly a U2-only website like U2//NZ, Lypton Village has been extremely beneficial to Australian U2 fans who have wanted to keep up-to-date with the latest U2 news relevant to their own country.
More often than not, however, their U2 news has also been our U2 news and vice-versa (although the Aussies did get one over us with the Popmart Tour!). U2 New Zooland and Lypton Village are, essentially, catering to the same group of U2 fans in this part of the world. Not surprisingly, we have some Aussie U2 fans registered here on these forums and, conversely, some Kiwi U2 fans have registered on Lypton Village (and a few are actually registered to both).
Amanda and I have recently started to ponder the future of both of our websites. Our enthusiasm for forever chasing U2 news stories relevant to U2 fans in Australasia has somewhat waned and we haven't been committing nearly as much time to our sites as we used to. In fact, Amanda has all but walked away from Lypton Village due to personal time constraints and the fact that she will soon be relocating to Canada.
As far as U2 New Zooland is concerned, we've been very fortunate to have Scarla working tirelessly behind the scenes to help keep things ticking over. Without her help and encouragement, U2//NZ would have fallen over soon after the Vertigo Tour, such were the demands placed on us before and during the tour.
My enthusiasm took another major hit when U2 New Zooland was hacked several times last year. I spent hours and hours trying to get to the bottom of the security breach...and failed! My web hosting company eventually lost their patience with me, cancelled my account and banned the U2NewZooland.com domain. The joys of being a website owner!
Fortunately, however, I managed to relocate U2//NZ to a new web host and reinstall the site from backups. Since then, Scarla and I have been able to keep these forums reasonably active, which has been our priority over any other part of the site. The downside to that is that the rest of the site (including the front page) has been somewhat neglected in recent times. A flow-on effect of that is that we're now getting less and less traffic through the site, which has further knocked my enthusiasm recently; it's hard to justify putting time into a fan-based website that, essentially, is catering to no more than about 30-40 people regular visitors.
Amanda Gilligan and I have both come to the same conclusion recently; that our sites are dying a very slow death and that something needs to be done to rekindle our interest before they both go the way of the dodo.
Now for the good news!...
Last week, I put a proposal forward to Amanda that we should perhaps look at merging our two sites together into a completely new website (and accompanying forum) to cater for U2 fans from Australia and New Zealand. As I said to Amanda, it would be a shame if we didn't have something available for local U2 fans when the 360 Tour comes Down Under next year.
My hope is that a combined website for all U2 fans from Australia and New Zealand would lead to increased traffic and membership... and that maintaining it would no longer seem like such a waste of time and effort. If we are able to get more U2 fans together into a combined site, then it will keep everyone a lot more interested.
Fortunately, Amanda agreed that merging our sites is the logical step to take and we are already in the process of making it happen.
My original proposal was to merge both of our forums, retaining all existing topics/posts and, most importantly, members (across both forums). Even though this would be technically possible, it's now apparent that there isn't really enough U2-specific content within the Lypton Village forums to warrant a complete import into these forums. Besides, that's something that's beyond my level of expertise and it would cost USD$120 to get it done commercially.
So, our current way of thinking is that we would retain the U2 New Zooland Forums as they are, but re-brand them and relocate them to a new domain. We'd then simply send out an invitation to members of Lypton Village and hope they would be interested in re-registering with the new site.
As far as a new domain name is concerned, Amanda, Scarla and I have discussed a couple of options and, at this stage, we have pretty much settled on our favourite one. Exactly what that is, though, we're not actually going to say yet because we'd be very interested to see if anyone else can think of anything better!! So, there's a challenge for you all (all 32 of you!
)
Other than that, it should be said that we'd love some feedback about this proposal. Love the idea, or hate it? Please let us know!
Across the ditch in Australia, Amanda Gilligan has been managing a U2 news blog and forum known as Lypton Village, which has been online for the last few years. While not strictly a U2-only website like U2//NZ, Lypton Village has been extremely beneficial to Australian U2 fans who have wanted to keep up-to-date with the latest U2 news relevant to their own country.
More often than not, however, their U2 news has also been our U2 news and vice-versa (although the Aussies did get one over us with the Popmart Tour!). U2 New Zooland and Lypton Village are, essentially, catering to the same group of U2 fans in this part of the world. Not surprisingly, we have some Aussie U2 fans registered here on these forums and, conversely, some Kiwi U2 fans have registered on Lypton Village (and a few are actually registered to both).
Amanda and I have recently started to ponder the future of both of our websites. Our enthusiasm for forever chasing U2 news stories relevant to U2 fans in Australasia has somewhat waned and we haven't been committing nearly as much time to our sites as we used to. In fact, Amanda has all but walked away from Lypton Village due to personal time constraints and the fact that she will soon be relocating to Canada.
As far as U2 New Zooland is concerned, we've been very fortunate to have Scarla working tirelessly behind the scenes to help keep things ticking over. Without her help and encouragement, U2//NZ would have fallen over soon after the Vertigo Tour, such were the demands placed on us before and during the tour.
My enthusiasm took another major hit when U2 New Zooland was hacked several times last year. I spent hours and hours trying to get to the bottom of the security breach...and failed! My web hosting company eventually lost their patience with me, cancelled my account and banned the U2NewZooland.com domain. The joys of being a website owner!
Fortunately, however, I managed to relocate U2//NZ to a new web host and reinstall the site from backups. Since then, Scarla and I have been able to keep these forums reasonably active, which has been our priority over any other part of the site. The downside to that is that the rest of the site (including the front page) has been somewhat neglected in recent times. A flow-on effect of that is that we're now getting less and less traffic through the site, which has further knocked my enthusiasm recently; it's hard to justify putting time into a fan-based website that, essentially, is catering to no more than about 30-40 people regular visitors.
Amanda Gilligan and I have both come to the same conclusion recently; that our sites are dying a very slow death and that something needs to be done to rekindle our interest before they both go the way of the dodo.
Now for the good news!...
Last week, I put a proposal forward to Amanda that we should perhaps look at merging our two sites together into a completely new website (and accompanying forum) to cater for U2 fans from Australia and New Zealand. As I said to Amanda, it would be a shame if we didn't have something available for local U2 fans when the 360 Tour comes Down Under next year.
My hope is that a combined website for all U2 fans from Australia and New Zealand would lead to increased traffic and membership... and that maintaining it would no longer seem like such a waste of time and effort. If we are able to get more U2 fans together into a combined site, then it will keep everyone a lot more interested.
Fortunately, Amanda agreed that merging our sites is the logical step to take and we are already in the process of making it happen.
My original proposal was to merge both of our forums, retaining all existing topics/posts and, most importantly, members (across both forums). Even though this would be technically possible, it's now apparent that there isn't really enough U2-specific content within the Lypton Village forums to warrant a complete import into these forums. Besides, that's something that's beyond my level of expertise and it would cost USD$120 to get it done commercially.
So, our current way of thinking is that we would retain the U2 New Zooland Forums as they are, but re-brand them and relocate them to a new domain. We'd then simply send out an invitation to members of Lypton Village and hope they would be interested in re-registering with the new site.
As far as a new domain name is concerned, Amanda, Scarla and I have discussed a couple of options and, at this stage, we have pretty much settled on our favourite one. Exactly what that is, though, we're not actually going to say yet because we'd be very interested to see if anyone else can think of anything better!! So, there's a challenge for you all (all 32 of you!
)Other than that, it should be said that we'd love some feedback about this proposal. Love the idea, or hate it? Please let us know!
