DrivingEnthusiast.net has been updated with a new section: Competitive Views
Competitive Views starts out with a chart comparing the specs of the Challenger, Camaro, and Mustang. There are also extensive high-res images and press releases for each car. In the future, further comparisons will be added for their suspension systems, engines, and more.
Other cars will follow in the longer term - next up will be the Miata, S2000, and Solstice.
DrivingEnthusiast.net is comprised of over 10k web pages and 15k images. This new section will consolidate detailed specs and high-res images across several separate sections - information which would otherwise be buried deep inside the site.
The best-kept secret of DrivingEnthusiast.net is that it is actually a network of 5 individual sites:
DrivingEnthusiast.net
S2000Enthusiast.com
EvoXenthusiast.com
Challenger.DrivingEnthusiast.net
CarMovieEnthusiast.com
And that is the problem. Looking over site stats, we see that few people go from one site to the other. The sites were originally split apart because of different audiences: S2000 owners don't want to know about Fords, etc. (and the converse is even more true). And the Car Movie topic needed to stand on it's own. Hence, 5 individual sites. But the owner has interests across multiple topics, as do many readers.
To solve the problem, we've added a blue navigation bar consistently across all 5 sites. This provides an indication of the other sites to readers, as well as consistent navigation.
Navigation around the network is easy. Each of the 5 websites has the blue navigation bar at the top of the site:
Click on the logo (mouse not shown) and links for the other 4 sites will drop down. Click on any of those 4 to proceed to that site.
For those of you interested in building your own sites, take this as a lesson learned. You may have multiple interests, but in this hobby some reader's interests often are closed. And site stats need to be carefully analyzed to see if your sites are generating interest in each other.
In the longer term, more sites can now be added. But to keep consistent, from now on we'll add them as subdomains in the form of xxxx.DrivingEnthusiast.net where xxxx is the name of the topic (car) in question. This will save on the cost of domain registration and ISP costs. Remember that the DrivingEnthusiast network is a private non-commercial entity (unlike 99% of the sites on the web for automotive hobbyists). Referral fees earned thru Amazon and Google are used solely to (barely) pay for the ISP and domain registration costs.
No enthusiast website and blog would be complete without acknowledging Toyota - a name synonymous with great cars for driving enthusiasts.
Therefore, we've added a new section specific to Toyota and Lexus - featuring the Supra and FT-HS Concept to get us started. Our Toyota-Lexus blog has already been running for a few years, and we've got specific category blogs covering the Supra, 2000GT, Concepts, and the Lexus F Series. Our purpose in creating these new features is to make sure material and documentation of these great cars is available for years to come.
The Toyota-Lexus section is still under construction, and there is a long way to go yet. Stay tuned as we research and post more material...
Follow the links on the DrivingEnthusiast.net site to the new Toyota-Lexus section and blogs.
DrivingEnthusiast.net is a collection of several related sites. All are personally owned by me, personally paid for, and non-commercial (other than some limited Google and Amazon advertsing which helps pay the monthly ISP bill). What started as a simple site showcasing a couple of dozen high-res images of the IRS suspension under my '99 Cobra has grown into an enormous collection of ionformation covering a number of different brands and topics of interest.
Physically, it runs on Windows 2003 Server, and is created with Microsoft Expression Web and FrontPage from a Windows Vista Ultimate/Office 2007 Ultimate dual-core workstation. Blogs are created via Radio Userland.
The "ABOUT" button will take you to a more detailed section, which I'm gradually filling in with the goal of helping readers leverage my experiences in order to create and maintain their own sites. While the site is gigantic, it wasn't hard to create thanks to FrontPage. Technically, I'm gradually switching over to ExpressionWeb and I've just started taking advantage of (in a very minor way) .Net 2.0 to build much-needed tree-style menus.
The most popular pages/posts that consistently get several hundred unique hits a week are my high-res images of the MazdaSpeed 2.3 engine, my images of a cutaway (current model) MX-5 Miata, my unique story of Ford's Mustang SVO teams in the 24 Hours of Nelson, my SHO Taurus pages, and my story of the developed-but-cancelled S197 IRS. But, there's lots more. >12k web pages, >10k images, and tons of videos.
Most current stats of all these sites:
HTML files: 417 meg
PDF files: 178 meg
jpeg files: 697 meg
mpeg files: 149 meg
WMV files: 314 meg
AVI files: 28 meg
blog postings: >2317 posts, cataloged in over 115 categories. All with RSS feeds.
Blog navigation tree: implemented on main page. This new feature considerably simplifies the navigation of blog categories and will be the model for the rest of the site. Some appearance and functionality tuning is still taking place. This feature was implemented in ASP.Net using the Treeview server-side control.
What's new in blogs?
New Categories: many new categories on several topics.
Website creation blog categories: New categories to index postings of how to create a website, how I use Microsoft Expression Web (FrontPage), how I use Radio Userland for the blog, and the existing category of Website News.
RSS feeds: now exposed via the browser via "link" HTML embedded in the page. Therefore, all orange "RSS" links have been removed from the pages. Note that RSS feed URLs will not change - so you do not have to change your subscriptions.
All 2300+ blog entries have been reposted in order to get the latest template.
What else is new on the site?
Have you seen the new high-res "Concept-RA" images on the Evo site?
logo (mouse not shown) and links for the other 4 sites will drop down. Click on any of those 4 to proceed to that site.
DrivingEnthusiast.net is a collection of several related sites. All are personally owned by me, personally paid for, and non-commercial (other than some limited Google and Amazon advertsing which helps pay the monthly ISP bill). What started as a simple site showcasing a couple of dozen high-res images of the IRS suspension under my '99 Cobra has grown into an enormous collection of ionformation covering a number of different brands and topics of interest.
