Well, here we are again. It’s the last issue of the year. It seems like I should have some feeling of finality regarding it. After all, it’s been a long and busy year here. Over the past year, we have published over 80 different articles, and reviews and that’s far from all the new content that was added this year. We started the long process of creating for the first time a comprehensive list of bios for EDM producers who are Christians, and we are just starting to scratch the surface with the initial 43 we currently have. Beyond that, we had a total redesign of the site from the ground up. I mean, as far as Tastyfresh.com was concerned, this was a huge year, and I should be ready to put things to rest for a while, right?

Well, in a way, I wish I could. Unfortunately, over the past three months or so, I’ve been noticing some kinks in the system that need to be ironed out. It is not enough to simply have a site and constantly add new content to it. Granted, content is what should drive websites and especially sites like this one, but content is useless if people are not being drawn to it. In fact, people, both long-term members and prospective members seem to be missing out on some of the content here. This is problem number one.

Problem number two has to do more with the larger community in general. While the message boards here are great, part of the purpose of Tastyfresh.com is to get people out and working together with other Christians in what God is leading them to do. I am constantly getting emails from people looking for like-minded Christians in their area who love EDM. In May 2005, we came up with the idea of starting local groups around the world as a hybrid between your typical small group and a house party. We initially called them Groove Fellowships. Well, ideally these new people should be able to come onto this site and find a group that is meeting regularly in their area or find out how to start a group. Currently, we don’t have this. We don’t even have a list of regular ongoing DJ led worship events similar to Club Worship. This needs to be resolved.

The last major problem with the site that I can see is that we are not attracting a lot of new blood. We have a GOOD and STEADY influx of people joining the forum. I’m extremely happy to see that, but not all of them become active members, and regardless of how many members the message board has, for the past year, the number of unique visitors to the site, as a whole, has remained virtually the same. Something needs to be done to market this site better. I don’t just want to attract new people, I want to promote people who love EDM and are looking for website where they can feel loved by the members and at the same time learn from the community and contribute something to it as well. This is no easy task.

All of this adds up to one thing: another redesign of the site.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now and I think I have a base solution for at least the first two, if not three, problems. The first thing that has to happen before anything else is there has to be a way to easily let people know when the site has been updated. Most people have the forums bookmarked. In reviewing the logs, more people are entering the site through the forums than any other page. Because all of the new content is only listed on the homepage, the regular readers do not notice updates until weeks later, if they do at all. This means that I need a way to put links to these updates on the forums in a way that everyone can see what is new quickly and easily and without cutting into the current space used by the forums themselves. The solution: a totally new and redesigned navigation bar.

This new navigation bar will replace the current one. Rather than being a vertical bar on the left of the page, it will be a horizontal one at the top just below the banner. This means that I will not have a sub navigation attached to it. Instead, there will be a new left navigation bar that changes based on where you are in the site. This horizontal bar then frees me up to build all of Tastyfresh.com as a series of “micro sites” with the home page existing as a way to pull all of them together.

This means that Tastyfresh.com Home would focus on what Tastyfresh.com is, who works on it, the shop, news, and promoting the content in the other sections. The magazine would then be revamped visually giving it actual archives for articles over a year or so old. Reviews would pretty much be the same as the magazine. The forums would actually be a part of the community section however. The community will feature the forums, a chat room, and a links page. Then there will be the hardest section of all to make: the Groove Fellowship/Collective site.

First of all, I am 90% sure that I am going to change the name of the Groove Fellowships to Groove Collective as was suggested early on by some of our Canadian members. The more I think about it, a collective is more of what I think these could be. They’re to be a collaborative group of people who start by simply hanging out but eventually could be involved in their local club scene as ministers, promoters or whatever. The difficult part of this is that I want each Collective to have a space to blog within the site. How I will do this isn’t clear in my head yet. I just don’t want to simply give every one access to Tastyfresh’s CMS because there isn’t adequate workflow built in to prevent a mistake from wiping out a large portion of the content here. Just know that, when the redesign is done, each Groove Collective should have space within Tastyfresh.com to solicit members, keep their members informed, and of course promote their events.

In addition to revamping the location of the content and its presentation. The site will use various RSS feeds to display new content links on other parts of the site, like the forums, that typically “trap” users interest, introduce keyword based related links to all of the articles and strive for better search engine optimization. Once completed, I feel that these things will help to move people around the site a bit more. That will only leave the third issue, which is a lack of growth.

The lack of growth is a huge concern of mine. As I mentioned earlier, we are having new people join the forums at a regular pace. The problem seems to be two fold. First, we are not retaining people like we should. And second, we are not attracting enough people to actually sustain growth. We simply have managed to sustain our current member levels. We need to be growing more. That means we need to promote the site more. I am still working on this one; however, I do have one thing I can share with you that will go a long way toward resolving this issue.

As many of you know, Fitzpatrick, Oneel and a few of their other buds formed a DJ collective called BTU Live . That’s Birmingham Trance Underground Live and not a measurement of how much hot air is in a room. As part of that collective, they started a bi-monthly podcast called Guide to the Weekend. The group has since expanded to include a start up label, and they hosted their first major event at the beginning of this month with Shiloh as the headliner. What some of you may not know is that their podcast has close to 100,000 downloads a month thanks to iTunes and the love that Hybridized.org shows them.

Given BTU’s near instant popularity and their already close ties with Tastyfresh.com, it would be a natural progression for the two groups to join together. Starting in 2007, BTU will be expanding their podcasting to include several other specialty shows. One of those shows will be a Tastyfresh show. The format hasn’t been fully worked out yet, but I will be producing it and will seek to get mixes from some of the best Christian DJs and producers out there. Expect to more on this endeavor sooner rather than later. It is my hope that this show will help to raise awareness of Christians who are active in the dance scene and to, at the very least, put a smile on people’s faces.

Well, that’s about it for now. I really wanted to let you know about some of the major changes that will be happening around here in 2007. I believe the podcast will start first, unless I can talk Oneel out of it. The other changes will take time to get done, but I promise you that they will. If you have any other ideas regarding how to resolve these issues, feel free to share them with me or on the board.

In Christ,
Dave R