"Brendan, can you write Part 3 of our birthday series?" came the ICQ request from our editor, Julian. Parts 1 & 2 talked about how we started and how Julian and Michael put each issue together and, to finish the series, Julian wanted to give you an idea of what happens on the web side of things at AutoSpeed.
"Hang on a minute, I'm a publisher, not a writer!" was my initial thought. But of course the last time Julian was in the office (better known as The Shed), AutoSpeed didn't even have a name. How would he write about the web publishing side of AutoSpeed when he hasn't even seen it himself? Being 700+ kilometres away, I don't think that he's likely to be dropping in anytime soon...
"Ok, when is my deadline?" I said, quickly sliding into my new role as a writer.
"Two weeks".
Two weeks! Plenty of time; I should be able to knock it over in a few hours on the weekend...
Well it's now Sunday afternoon and I'm in the office casting my eye over Issue 51, which will be launched at midnight, tomorrow night. Everything looks under control. According to my ICQ listing, Julian's been on the Internet for the last hour or so but has just gone offline. Probably doing his proof read of the issue or putting together this week's Performance News. There are no corrections in the email from him yet so it could be smooth sailing. Andrea's just wandered into the office to finish off some of tomorrow's jobs early, so this issue should be a breeze.
With no other pressing duties to perform, it's time to get back to my article. My deadline passed about 5 days ago and Julian's probably getting nervous about whether he'll have enough time to edit it (or more likely, rewrite the whole thing!).
Getting it Together
When AutoSpeed was first conceived, we estimated it would take 20-25 hours a week to put each issue together. We already had another web site, AutoWeb (www.autoweb.com.au), and thought we had a pretty good idea about how long it would take to scan the pics, format the articles and do the normal quality control stuff. We didn't want AutoSpeed to impact too much on the work we were doing with AutoWeb either - after all, at the time it was our main business. We knew there would be a fair bit of design work to do in the early stages but that'd all be finished before the first issue went online, wouldn't it?
Publishing each issue is normally a fairly straightforward process. The Express Post satchel from Julian generally arrives Thursday morning (except for the time Australia Post misplaced it and it didn't arrive until early Monday afternoon, leaving us just enough time to get the issue together for launch under 12 hours later!).
Before we even open the yellow envelope we have a pretty good idea if it's going to be an easy issue or a tough one. The thinner the envelope, the better! If it's more than an inch thick we know what's coming - another of Michael's Buyer's Guides, probably with 30 or 40 images that have to be scanned from a variety of catalogues with paper so thin that the image on the other side of the page shows through. If that's the case, it looks like we'll be spending the afternoon touching up the pics.
Our early estimation of 20-25 hours per week turned out to be ample time to get each issue together. A few hours scanning slides, photos and those dreaded catalogues followed by an hour or two formatting the articles - and then most of the hard work is done. Andrea normally drops by sometime over the weekend or on Monday to put the fancy text on the title pics, produce the cover pic for the issue and format the PDF versions of the articles (probably the most tedious part of each issue).
As the time for launch draws closer, the last few jobs are completed. Julian's probably found a few corrections that require attention (he was being kind in last week's article when he said we'd put some pics in upside down only once or twice), format the last-arrival Performance News article, build the files for the newsletter and update the database of new members and newsletter subscribers. By 5pm Monday, the issue is ready to go and it's time to take a few hours off before the midnight launch.
Midnight comes around and launch of the issue is just a mouse click away. The only problem is that sometimes I'm still half an hour from the office after another late finish at snooker on the other side of town. I know there's probably a hundred or so readers clicking the refresh button on our home page every minute or so hoping to see the new issue come up so I'm urging the Camry on.(Just a Camry... but Brendan, tell them about the twin turbo, transverse 1UZ-FE Lexus V8 in it! - Editor)
Be patient guys, I'll be there soon.
With the issue launched, a few quick trial clicks around the site ensures everything is working alright. Then it's onto the newsletter. As well as all of our members, we have around 5,000 newsletter subscribers, so getting the newsletter out takes a while. I'm not game enough to just press the button and go to bed, so I just sit and wait as our mailer program steadily progresses through its list of email addresses. By 2am it's finished and I'm outa here.
Build it and They Will Come
It has often been said in the media that the Internet levels the playing field. Because of global accessibility, a corner store can compete on the same level as a multi-national corporation. All you need is a web site, which you can build yourself after acquiring a few basic HTML skills, and you can start peddling your products to a worldwide audience. Worth instant millions, surely... But there are over 100,000 registered commercial domains in Australia and millions worldwide. The top 100 web sites in the world attract more traffic than the millions of other web sites all put together. How did we expect to make AutoSpeed a success with that much competition?
Obviously, the first task was to put together the web site. When we first met with Julian in early September, 1998 and agreed to create AutoSpeed, we gave ourselves a month to get the site design completed, and set a launch date for the first issue of October 13. Julian and Michael already had most of the first 20 articles completed so it was up to us to do the rest.
All of the design work was to be done in-house. We didn't have the financial resources to pay a web design company the many thousands of dollars it would have taken to come up with a suitable design and to develop all the background database technology. Ian would be responsible for all the programming while I handled the design and site structure. Ed would put together the articles for the first couple of issues and keep AutoWeb going. But from the very start we had a big problem - Ian still had three months to go on a private programming contract, so he'd only be able to work nights and weekends. The site was to be developed totally in a database form, so until Ian could get the database work finished, much of the site design couldn't proceed. But after many late nights and long weekends, the site was completed on time and within budget. We even had some time left to do a bit of fine-tuning before the launch of the first issue a few days' later.
At the time I'd recently come across some old statistics from the early days of AutoWeb, the site that we'd been running for two years. The printout was for a day about 3 months after we'd launched that site. There'd been a grand total of 23 visitors to AutoWeb that day, and for a period of just over 3 hours nobody had visited the site at all! I started to get very nervous about our upcoming AutoSpeed launch. What if nobody came? We'd made all sorts of projections over the previous weeks about how many visitors we would get to the site, how many pages (or ads) they would view and what sort of growth we would need to be able to make a profit from advertising. Our fears were eased somewhat on the day of the launch: 698 visitors viewed just under 15,000 pages and also gave us some great feedback. It was something to build on.
In a way not much has changed since those early days, which already seem so distant. AutoSpeed is still published from where it all began, in the garage of my home. The coffee table we first sat at when we conceived AutoSpeed (borrowed from my lounge room) is now the boardroom table and there are a few more chairs available. Ian is now full-time and Andrea has joined the team on a part-time basis to help out where required. The computer system has been upgraded and the list on the whiteboard of things to do has grown considerably longer.
But in other ways, the change has been quite radical. AutoSpeed has grown from strength to strength. We now have more than 30,000 readers and recently ranked as the 45th most popular web site in Australia, making the AutoSpeed/AutoWeb network the busiest privately-owned web sites in the country. Our community of readers reaches over 100 countries worldwide.
So, instant millions? Not yet. The financial rewards may still be some way off but we're having a great time getting there.
AutoSpeed - The Story! Part 1
AutoSpeed - The Story! Part 2
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