We wanted to take a quick poll and see if it would be worth the time to setup a dedicated community site that offers PC custom scripts, add-ons, articles, blogs ...

What do you folks think?  Would it be worth the time / effort?

Cheers,

Brian

PS:

If you are a developer PM me with your contact info.

Hi Mark -

Are there specific features you would find important for the community site?

We certainly encourage you to do that. It would definitely be helpful. We would be happy to link to it. Among the systems to build that kind of Web site, here is an interesting one: http://www.ning.com/ - http://www.ning.com/

To clarify, we do not plan on "monitizing" the website.  This will be an open community of PC owners and developers.  

Here is what I am planning on rolling out. initially:

1) Ability to join community
2) Blogs for those who wish to actively participate in the community.
3) Download section (for NON Early Impact software)
4) Discussion forums
5) Training videos (with a you-tube-type interface)
6) How-to guides and articles
Plus whatever else the community feels we will need.

Suggestions are always welcome on features we should add (or remove).

The blogs, articles, forums and such will have unqiue RSS feeds attached.

Adding a wiki is not a problem. I added it to the list.

What you're describing is exactly what I was looking for this forum to provide when I jumped on the Product Cart bandwagon about 3 months ago. I was mostly interested in simple, easy to understand processes and code snippets for modifying the PC files to perform simple changes (like changing the position of a "back" and "submit" button so that "back" was located on the left, or change the "close" button to be an image that matched the rest of the storefront). That's why most of my posts were in an effort to help others who may not be programmers nor even familiar with website creation but are able to use a program like Dreamweaver and poke around and insert code to make pages look and function the way they want them to. I have spoken to numerous people about how today, unlike 10 years ago, its possible to buy a template that has the style that you're looking for, augment and change the templage files in Photoshop, use Product Cart for the front and back end integration of e-commerce, and someone with a minor understanding of those programs could get 99% of the way to a fully functioning e-commerce site within a week or two. That last 1% is the killer. Using this technique (with the exception that I chose to find a template with the look I wanted, and choosing to create it myself in Photoshop mainly in an effort to learn) I had the basic site complete within two (2) weeks. I had even shown it to a group that I was in discussions with to resell their products and it completely freaked them out. They had spent tens of thousands of dollars and months of development creating a similar site using some other shopping cart software and none of the partners was willing to try and do some of the work themselves. As a result of my showing of the site they immediately stopped negotiations because now I'm a threat to their online sales. They thought it was going to take me months of development and cost thousands of dollars and by then they would have their distribution business up and running and wouldn't have to rely on online sales to keep their company running. All in all if you Form a DBA or Corporation, Open a Bank Account, Purchase Product Cart, Purchase a Template, Purchase a Web Address, Purchase a Website Hosting Package, Purchase Hackersafe and an SSL Certificate and sign up for a Merchant Account you're probably looking at spending around $3,000. That's if you do the modifications to the PC files yourself, take photographs of the products yourself and create all the information you intend on having on your site yourself. Obviously you can enlist the help of fellow PC'ers through the use of a site like you're describing, or friends to do some of the work. I had been looking at many different products to offer customers as well as keeping an eye on Product Cart and learning everything I could about e-commerce and what it takes to start a site for about a year and a half before giving myself the green light to get started, but that's just my personality. Others will be different. I'd be more than happy to create tutorials helping others do what I did to fine tune Product Cart. Keep us informed as to your progress and let us know when we can start adding content. I'm about a week away from going "live" with the site and will post it here for others to comment on then. Everyone here has been a great help and I really appreciate your willingness to help others like myself. Keep it up.

Thanks for the feedback, Jack.

We have the core part of the website setup (domain, wiki, forums and blogs).  Once we finish polishing the site over the next week we will begin looking for folks that wish to participate in the site.

Cheers.

Brian

Would be very interested in this!! Glad to see it's happening!!

Any action on this to date....???

I'm interested in helping... Lets get this up and running...

Rob