Web Site

I'm currently setting up a website for boat design within the UK and am looking for ideas for content.

With thanks,
Philip Tomkins

http://www.boatdesign.co.uk

[sharkeymarine]

Visit my site, There is a little of everything. It's my first site, but I'm working on it... http://www.sharkeymarine.com

[Jeff]

I'm currently setting up a website for boat design within the UK and am looking for ideas for content.

I suppose it all depends on where your interests lie, what your motivation is, and what you hope to get out of the site.

In one sense, it is much more difficult to start a site now than in, say, 1996 or 97, because now there is much more competition and the competition is much more established. In 96 or 97 it was pretty easy to identify a niche which wasn't filled at all and create a quickly-successful site by filling it. Now, it is a bit more difficult and takes more time and money if your notion is to create the “biggest, best, etc. etc.”

On the other hand, now is a more exciting and interesting time than ever to be creating a website because more designers and builders are online than ever before. It's wonderful that as many resources are online as there are, and every additional resource is even better. That is the idea of the "web" after all.

Just to carry the thread off topic a bit, the fact that your domain is a co.uk domain instead of the “common standard” US-dominated worldwide .com, .net, or .org makes me wonder how much regional difference there is right now in Yacht Design. It seems today that everything tends to be merged and globalized, and I wonder what country-specific and regional design legacies still influence designers around the world. It might be quite interesting to have a design site by major regional style, a boatdesign.co.uk and a boatdesign.com.au and a boatdesign.mid.east. Just a though - I'm really not sure if today or tomorrow regional classifications have definition, or whether marine design is 'sophisticated' enough and globalized enough that regional ties are meaningless. Or maybe it would simply be a case of rotating styles in many of the major regions, so to separate the style would be more meaningful than to focus on where that style was at the given moment...

[Stephen Ditmore]

There's one already worth checking out at
www.naval-architects.org