I have volunteered to help Stu with the Cauldron website. So if you have suggestions, items that need to be added please PM me here or email me. If you need my email address send me a PM. Stu and I both want to make the site useful to all so any suggestions, input is welcome. Thanks Mark
Thanks. We are certainly going to add more photos and in the short term link to all the blogs that have surfaced in the off season. Updated profiles? What do you mean exactly?
This is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt. Never really liked the profile page, it has about an 1/8th of the people who are in the cauldron. Plus it seems that myspace and facebook do a better job of that. Now if you linked peoples profiles with their socail-networking page of choice it might be better connection. Just one ill and grumpy persons opinion.
I'd like to see design-a-banner contests, blog postings, volunteer-needed job board, whatever we can to help people remember to keep checking in on what's going on for 2008 and how they can help make it better. I would've loved if George and George's new blog was part of the Cauldron site instead. That email news blast is like Du Nord KC. Very useful. I'd also be willing to lend you a hand if you need in a few weeks once I catch up with work.
Funny you mentioned the "People" section -- it is past its sell by date and will soon be removed. Not sure yet what to replace it with -- if anything, but it does need to go. Criticisms are welcome as well as suggestions, so please fire away. No feelings can be hurt here.
The blog suggestion keeps coming up as does a podcast (via PMs from others). As both George's have their blog and Mike has is and we have the group effort now on Oz City, and the official one are we going to be blogged out? I dunno.... But certainly linking to them all is definitely in the works. Great suggestions, keep them coming.
First Jeff, I'd love to have the help. Contact me when you get some free time and we can talk. I'm hoping to 1) link out to as many fan blogs as possible and 2) encourage said blog writers - and anyone else for that matter - to write articles to post on the Cauldron site. I like the banner contest idea. I'm thinking the prize could be... you get to make your banner and display it at the games. OK, fine - we could come up with a real prize. As I communicated to Mark earlier today, I have a fairly long - and probably very aggressive - list of ideas for the site and the Cauldron communications area in general for the coming year. I still need to run them by the rest of the leadership group before taking them too public in case someone has strong objections to any of the ideas. From a volunteer perspective - if you can write, like to take pictures/videos/record audio, have HTML, JavaScript or graphics skills or just have grand visions - drop me a line and I'd love to have the help. The site belongs to everyone in the Cauldron and I'd like it to reflect that. Contact me at communications at kccauldron dot com.
By the way, I'd love to help on the website if I can. I am pretty good at this whole information super highway thing.
This takes a lot of work....but FAST updates. We need photos, game reviews, tailgate news, road trip stories, etc. all to be added quickly week in and week out. We also need to change content weekly.
I agree with that. It looks like we are excluding people and the mention of facebook/myspace is very valid. I have linked kccauldron.com now from the AG/OG blog. And oh man! I love the outpour of support here for the website this season! I think it's great. Getting this much help will hopefully generate a better site with better content, ect.
Agreed. This also takes volunteers to help out - content doesn't write itself and pages take some effort to update. We're getting more people stepping up to help and that's great. As for "game reviews" what do you have in mind? I guess I've never envisioned this site to be a Wizards news/review site as much as a place to go to learn about the supporters section and the fans.
As Mark said, this page is already on the chopping block. We have outgrown that and it's on its way out. Ya grumpy old f*er. Oh wait...I'm the guy who went to the hospital today for a heart attack scare...guess I"m the old one eh?
I'll second that! After two years of running this site with hardly any help it's great to see so many people ready to help out. Guess I need to get more batches of homebrew going - gotta pay the help somehow and there's no money to be had lol.
I make a fairly decent living with my Internet day job. Granted, designing web apps for a GPS company is quite different than this HTML stuff. But hey, if ya don't want the beer... Once we get a good set of volunteers together we'll likely hook up at a pub somewhere and talk it over while downing a few pints...and no, I'm not paying for that beer...it's more expensive than mine.
Personally, I find podcasts to be massive circlejerks that rarely do much more than stack up, unlistened to on iTunes. In the terms of a blog, it'd be hard to determine what direction we'd take. We could just put up links to Ozcity (whoever runs that now will probably agree), Mike's blog, the Shooks' blog, Hillcrest road for team news and game analysis and then use the cauldron blog for everything else: i.e. a few "messages from the leadership," notes on supporter culture, upcoming events, chants and whatnot. I'd be pretty cool to give a weekly guest spot to the featured Cauldronite of the week. Everyone loves the chance to riff on a low traffic website.
Good podcasts can have massive audiences and cult-like followings. I usually find blogs to be self-indulgent drivel, and sports radio to be how you described podcasts, but each of the mediums have their good and bad. Might as well hit as many audiences as we can, eh?
If you guys want to riff on IRC channels, MP3afie, it then broadcast it, be my guest. It's just a real bitch to do.
Oz City, KC Soccer news, Hillcrest and DTB were all added as links today... As well as the invite to the practice facility tour.
Pretty much yeah. That's where all the general news items, alerts, updates, etc are. The other areas of the site are specific to an area or activity (roadtrips, tailgates, etc). I'm hoping to find a few people to "own" those from a content perspective this year. For example on the roadtrips page I'm hoping to get one or two people to put together written and video "stories from the road" kind of things. Something that shows the fun that is had on our trips. Just one example, but you get what I mean. Make the content more interesting and enticing. Waaaaay less static.
I Would Volunteer Anything You Would Need To Help ...i Also Would Like To Have The Oppurtunity To Add Some Photos... I Know Kathy Does Alot Of That And She Does A Great Job! I Think Getting Some Points Of View (thru The Camera Lens), Of The Other Cauldronites Would Be Cool. And Again I Want To Say That I Am In No Way Saying Her Pictures Arent Great.