An Update For You All

Hello everyone, so I thought I would officially update you about me and the forum/website. For anyone new then welcome and I hope this information is useful to you.

Recently I’ve spent a great deal of time “tweaking” the website in various ways, I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to that. For example I spent about 2 hours just trying to find the right width for the website to maximise the space for user posts, but at the same time not making the scale too large that it doesn’t look good on phones/tablets etc (although if you use a mobile devise the site defaults to the proboards mobile site version, if this happens to you then you can switch to normal view by clicking the desktop site button at the bottom of any page). I still have some tweaking to do when it comes to the main banner and the color of a few buttons here and there, but things are looking pretty good.

You will notice the left hand side bar has changed somewhat, I have updated the graphics and information it contains. I think the only thing I would add (and I’m stealing this idea from another site) is to have a link to the new up and coming SFT Magazine…. Yes that’s right, SFT will have a magazine. How often it’s produced I can’t say, but I’ll be doing my table coding thing and creating a template that any old fool and simply copy and paste and just type into.

On the subject of easy to use, I’ve been producing all the shows myself for a long time now using the template I created some time back, and the idea is that creating a great looking show should be an easy technical task, and I think that’s done now. The same goes for the Roster templates and the Card postings. I've got us a new image host as so far all the graphics have been held on my personal neocities site, and I'm in the process of moving all the graphics and wrestler pics over to this so that all staff have future access.

With regards to the shows themselves, when I’ve been producing I’ve tried my heart out to make the shows different, a step above what we have always had (which until recently was a load of matches written separately and pasted together and posted). Not only have I added pictures to the shows, I’ve created a new logo, added a couple of animated gifs, and I hope you will agree that this makes a HUGE difference to the shows. They now actually look like a wrestling show! And whilst it takes a little longer to format and add the pictures than I would like (the formatting is sadly down to the crap way in which Proboards formats text) I think my goal is almost achieved.

Staying on the subject of the shows, basically what happens backstage is that 4 people write a match each and Joey posts them in a thread and then it’s yours truly that adds them to the templates. But I’ve also been spending a considerable amount of time each week trying to make the shows “flow” much better. I’ve attempted this adding a lot of extra commentary throughout the shows from JC and RW, making RW a more comical heel and really tried hard to work on the banter between them, reference past shows etc. I’ve also been adding comical commercials which I’m sure you have all noticed and loved!

In a nutshell I’ve worked really hard to take the shows we produced to an entire new level, and I don’t think even the other staff have really grasped exactly how hard I’ve tried and how much time I’ve put into this. I absolutely hate writing matches…. (I’m terrible at them) but it’s got to the point where writing matches is the easy part lol. So I hope you have all appreciated this, and I would like some feedback because if nobody really gives a damn about it and just skips quickly to see if they have won their match, then we might as well just go back to copy and pasting 4 matches in a template and leaving it like that. So do let me know how you feel.

So a little about my future plans. I’ve already mentioned the magazine and some website tweaks, after that the key thing is getting all the other staff clued up and on board as so far everything you see has been me on my lonesome. I want all the staff to be able to produce shows, update the rosters etc so I’m going to be putting a user guide up backstage. It’s my bad for not doing that so far, but I’ve been so busy working on the site and producing Monday Night Chaos I’ve not really had time to show anyone else how to do it. It’s not tough now that I’ve done all the hard work but it’s still something you have to get the hang of. Once everyone is clued up on that then I can start taking a step back, especially now Reno has returned as Owner so I’m sure he and Joey between them can cover all the work I’ve been doing thus far.

That said I have enjoyed much of the work so I won't complain.

For me personally, well there have been all kinds of rumors about me and what I’m doing. I’m getting married in a few weeks, so expect me to be taking a couple of weeks leave of absence, then after that we will see. Depends how I feel at the time really, but to be honest just roleplaying a few times a month would be a complete and absolutely breeze compared to what I’ve been doing for SFT recently lol. I know a couple of you want my ass on a plate in the ring so I’ll see if I can find my mojo again and create some proper roleplays as Im so lacking inspiration at the moment I’m probably only running at 20% when it comes to my actual wrestling performance.

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed the update and more importantly I hope you are enjoying the site. I’m personally extremely proud of all the work I have done to drag this place from an old static out of date website into a fully interactive home for us all, so I hope at least someone out there is grateful! If not, well never mind, I made a promise to someone and I am a man of my word.

Thanks everyone, and great roleplays recently from you all. I’ve enjoyed reading them all tremendously.