Coming Attractions

Date: Monday, January 8, 2007
By: Webby

Foreword
Much of what I am about to state in this small article is actually something I would normally have communicated using the Webby Blog I setup late last year. However, I do not have the Webby Blog on the homepage at this time and not sure when and if it will eventually be part of the site. Therefore, I am placing this information in this location.

Standard Membership Vs Guests
Back in October I posted an article where I discussed the advantages and disadvantages of having a Standard membership on Party Boating versus no membership at all. That article touched on what parts of the site were accessible to Standard members and simple guests. Since that time, I have been contacted by numerous people through emails and told their views on the subject. Some of the people that contacted me where Premium members while others where Standard members or individuals that chose not to create a membership at all.

The emails I received contained a variety of ideas, many of them very good and worthy of serious consideration. Anyway, the theme of most of the emails was to suggest a direction to take concerning Standard members versus guests. Of course, I encourage everyone to not only create a Standard membership account, but to raise the account to Premium status in order to take advantage of everything the site has to offer. The emails suggested allowing standard members unfettered access to all non-premium material. I agree with this suggestion to a point.

I think Standard members that wish to have unfettered access to most areas of the site need to be contributors in some way. This can come by posting in the forums or by posting some of their pics in the Member Gallery. Over the next couple months I will rework the programming code to allow Standard members a little more access than just simple guests (a guest being someone that visits the site, but does not sign up for a Standard account).

New Content Coming To Premium Member Gallery
I want to let everyone know that I have a bunch of new content coming to the Premium Gallery area over the next month. This new content will be in the form of new galleries as well as new content being added to existing galleries. We try to add new content of some type each and every day. There is a new gallery being assembled to hold pictures from the Miami International Boat Show and a new hotties gallery called Beach Hotties II.

New Video Section To Be Added
I am sure most all of you have noticed the video I put on the homepage a couple weeks ago. I did that to give members a flavor of what will exist in the new video section that I am putting together at this time. I'm not exactly sure when the new video section will be up and running, but I would have to think I can have something put together by early next month. Of course, the video gallery will be for Premium members only. It cost money to get the video material, switch it over to a format that will work on the web site, get the disk space on the server and then the bandwidth to transmit. Oh yeah, members will not require any special software to view the videos and they even work across a dial-up connection.

Member Page
Some of you may have noticed a new member page. If you click on active member user names on the homepage you will be taken to the new member page. The page design will allow PB members to share more information about themselves and the area where they do their boating. More information will be announced about the new member page later.

Classified Ad Section
I have not worked on the classified ad section for some time. However, the software was very close to being ready for use. I would like to expand the classified software before bringing it online, but I doubt I'll be able to do so anytime soon.