10/23/2008First and foremost the Golden Gate board would like to extend our thanks for your attendance at the 2008 ALMS at Laguna Seca!
We would like to offer a special thanks to all of you that went out of your way to help staff this busy event, we could not have pulled it off without you!
Adding all the particulars of the weekend together, great people, great Audi’s, great location, great food, great weather and the ultimate Audi 1-2 finish, it all added up to a fantastic weekend event for everyone involved!
This is the 3rd year for the “New and Improved” ACGG car corral and again we have increased our attendance over the previous year. We had 7 states and 2 countries represented, members and their families pushed the total to well over 200 for the weekend and we hope all with smiling faces and great enthusiasm!
A lot of those around the tent expressed interest in volunteering to lend a hand with some of the club’s activities and we’d love to have you onboard! We have a volunteer database we keep with everyone’s contact info, if you would like to be added, just drop us a note, info@audiclubgoldengate.org , we will be in touch with upcoming events and other opportunities for you to be a part of.
It’s thanks to all of you, the membership, which makes the Golden Gate Chapter the best part of the ACNA!
8/10/2008Members, as I mentioned at the picnic, we're always looking for ways to improve the website and I've heard a few of you asking for a better way to link together announcements, the event calendar, and the registration for an event.
I've been thinking about this for a few weeks now, and after some prototyping of different options, I've rolled out a new event listing that has a direct link to the registration page for the event. This should make it faster, easier, and simpler to register for events.
You'll notice the new events information on the home page, below the section of the page which contains the announcements. 8/3/2008This Saturday we held the 2008 version of The Picnic in the Park. We ended up with about 40 club members attending, and had approximately 20 cars participate in the show 'n shine. It was certainly nice to meet a few more members, many of whom were more than happy to give us feedback on our work over the last 4 - 6 months.
We received feedback on how the BoD is running the club in general, feedback on the new website, and feedback on some of our upcoming events. I have to say that I was very pleased that the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and several members commented on how much they enjoy the emails, and newsletters that we've been sending out. As you might imagine, we're always looking to do the right thing for our members, and we need to be a financially viable club if we're to stay in business. So, it is with some hesitation that we send out the emailings to our members.
We certainly want as much participation as possible in all of our events, because when we fill up an event, as you might imagine, it's going to be profitable, while events that do not sell out cause the club to lose money. We try to balance these realities when we send out the invitations to attend the events, and we're always concerned that we're sending out too much information to our members. I was certainly surprised when several people came up to me to tell me that they actually enjoy getting these mailings.
While we're glad that you get a lot out of the mailings, and that you get excited to see what other events you might possibly attend, but rest assured, we will not abuse this privilege, and we will continue to exercise restraint when we send these mailings out to you.
Thanks to everyone that attended. We have a pretty good number of prizes to give away, and we gave away 5 passes to the upcoming ALMS hospitality tent at Laguna Seca.
7/26/2008At the last Board of Directors meeting, we discussed, and agreed that, in a continuing effort to keep our memebers informed on the actions of the Board, we will now be posting the agendas from each of our Board meetings.
If you're interested in seeing the meeting agendas from May, 2008 forward, you can browse to the BoD meeting agenda list to review the current list of meeting agendas. 7/9/2008As you can see, we're working to increase functionality, and improve the look and feel of the site. We are working on developing a "style" that will prevail throughout the site, and as we develop our thinking around styles, we often brainstorm ideas by trying any number of different presentation styles. This process is efficient, and collaborative, but it does have one annoying consequence... It means that sometimes, we'll post a new event, or announcement, only to modify that item any number of times over the course of an hour, day or week.
We have developed workflows that will automatically send these announcements out to all members that have subscribed, so rather than innundate our members with many, many duplicate (looking) announcements and events, we have decided to hold off on providing members with accounts to log in to the website until such a time that the BOD has agreed on some of these fundamental decisions.
Please bear with us as we work through this, and produce a site that is both functional, and pleasing to the eye...
Thanks,
Cliff 7/5/2008
Well all, we're having a bit more trouble than I expected getting the permissions set up so that all of you can have separate accounts. So, bear with us, and we'll be sure to get it rolled out, but there will be (is) a delay.
In the meantime, I'll be sure to keep you posted with the changes we're making, and offer any new content up to you first.
We're working on the Sponsor's pages, which will hopefully be completed by the end of the weekend, aproximately July 7th. 7/4/2008July 4th. I had a good meeting today at the track with Altamont management. This venue look promising. I am going to move forward with the logistics. I need some committment from members/help on possible dates. Suggestions please!
Pete 6/22/2008
Well, today is June 22nd, and it's about 5PM. The new site is up and running, and we're looking forward to getting some feedback.
There is of course still much work to be done, but we, the BoD believe that this is a great start to our new communication channell to you, our members.
We did not get all of the features enabled in time to provide accounts for all of our members, so for now, you'll just have to browse the site annomyously. In the near future, we'll be creating accounts for all of you, and sending the login information to you at that time. So, while work through these last details, please submit your comments directly to cliffordmusante@yahoo.com 6/18/2008
Well, today is June 18th, and it's about 9PM. The new site has not had any problems whatsoever, and the more we use it, the faster it seems to be posting pages. Today we coordinated with the hosting provider to prepare them for the cutover of the site this weekend.
Our plan is to cutover the Mail system before Friday, and then after final editing, and content creation on Saturday and Sunday, we'll make the DNS changes, and this site will appear when you type www.audiclubgoldengate.org.
Just about everything is in working order, but it's not clear whether we will have the new features added to the site in time to go live, or not. Without these features, we cannot write the workflow code which will allow members to make some of the preference settings that we believe are necessary, and are part and parcel to our new design.
If you have comments or suggestions, please login and submit them with your username/password. If you are an anonymous user, for now, please send them to cliffordmusante@yahoo.com 6/16/2008
Well, today is June 16th, and we have been working on enabling this new website for about 2 months now. We had really envisioned that the site would be up by now, but we've had some technical challenges with the site, and after a great amount of work was done, the site got corrupted, and we began experiencing eratic behavior, most of which would have really degraded the experience for our members/users.
After recreating the site, by hand, with the same hosting provider, we are now about a week or so from releasing this to our members. We're excited about this, and as you watch this blog over the next several weeks, you'll get a chance to see if we made our deadline, or not.
As the Web and Communications Director, I'm eager to share what we're doing for you, and how we're working hard to show you, our members, what we believe will be the most interactive, and personalized Audi Club website in the US.
Our goal is to put the ability to customize this site, for your own personal experiences, in your hands. Let's work together to produce a great site, with all the information you'll want or need, now, and in the future.
If you have comments or suggestions, please login and submit them with your username/password. If you are an anonymous user, for now, please send them to cliffordmusante@yahoo.com |
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