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LFTE: Welcome To The New Speed Arena!
By
Jul 12, 2004, 13:19

Welcome to the all-new redesigned Speed Arena v.4 - now with more features than a new Ford Focus, sexier looks than the newest Ferrari and a lot more content than the New York Times.

To be a little more serious though, welcome to the new Speed Arena. We've spent the last six months planning, evaluating, debating, designing and generally busting our butts to make Speed Arena a better website and, in reality, a better Motorsports Magazine. We poured over reader feedback, took a long hard look at what we were doing right and doing wrong and after many long hours we feel we have put together an improved Speed Arena for you the reader.

This has not been an easy task by any stretch of the imagination. Speed Arena was started more than three years ago and has amassed a huge collection of images (more than 40 GIG worth) and more than 6,000 HTML files in our News and Gallery sections alone.

You may have noticed over the last few months we stopped covering a few of the major race series. Speed Arena felt they were not getting as much traffic as others. Trying to be a well rounded motorsport site is a difficult job and we thought removing those series would free us up to focus on the remaining series. After tons of email complaining about the removal of the series from the site we have decided to put more hours in and cover everything we covered before.

We have also added a few series that have been requested from the readers. Trans Am and JGTC are now covered in the sportscar section. We are always looking for the hot new series to add to the site so please let us know if there is anything else you would like to see covered on the site.

So let's walk through some of the new changes you'll find on the new site:

Home Page: The Home Page of our site has been updated with a new look and feel and has been organized a bit better to make certain sections easier to scan through.

Forums: Over the last eight months we've been upgrading our backend servers and the forum software itself to keep it running as smoothly and quickly as possible. We're also moving forward with our plans to have all the forums centralized on one username database so you only need to use one user name and password on any of our enthusiast websites. In addition, our Community and Motorsport forums will be shared across multiple sites making it easier to stay within the community.

Features: The most radically changed of all our sections, Features has been given an all-new look and is now broken down into a number of subcategories:

- Car Features: This is where all features about race cars will reside. If you have a favorite race car you would like to see featured here please drop us an email and we will work at getting it covered.

- Teams & Driver Features: Here is where you will be able to see driver interviews, team overviews and any feature pertaining to teams and drivers.

- Events Features: Our Events Features is where you will find the latest coverage and photo galleries from domestic and international auto shows, races including race previews and reviews, and special motorsport events from around the world.

- Genral Features: A catch all for features that do not fall into any other catagory.

- Columns: Finally a place where our staff, special guests and even readers get a chance to sound off. We hope that you'll find this section a fun break from the usual news and features, plus we have a few "guest" columnists lined up that might surprise you.

- From the Editor: This is where you can listen to me vent or praise whats on my mind.

- Fanspeak: This is where you the reader can speak your mind. If you have something you want to get off your chest or give props to your favorite team you can send in a email and we will publish it.

- From the Drivers Eye: Will be a column by a guest driver about whatever is on his or her mind.

- Pit Walk: Getting a general idea of what is going on in and around the pits and of a race.

- The Guest: A place for special guests to say what they are thinking.

Resources: Our Resources section is broken down into five subcategories: Galleries with all the latest photos; iCal Calendars Motorsport Calendars for Apple Computers iCal Program. you Subscribe and every time the calendar is updated your copy in iCal will update too!; Links to anything motorsports on the web; Desktop Pictures for you to download and enjoy on your computer; Motorsport Glossary is full of motorsport words and phrases so if you are new to motorsports you know what we are talking about.

Marketplace: Featuring links to our Speed Arena Gear store, and Virtual Mall.


And to you, the readers, we thank you for your continued support over the years. It is always amazing to each of us here when we bump into someone at a show or race that mentions the site and how much he or she enjoys it. We hope the new changes make the site an even better resource. If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to click on the forum link below to let us know what you think.

Cheers and Race On!

-chuck

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