SpotON3D Office Hours - Upcoming Web Site & Community Updates

Office Hours is a live, and usually filmed, inworld forum where you can get the latest news on what’s up with SpotON3D, ask questions, and find out how you can join in on the fun.

During Office Hours on Friday, December 16, Tessa Harrington announced several exciting changes that will affect the design and layout of our Web sites, including some naming changes that will take effect in the near future. She also went over ways in which the different Web world communities will be able to connect with one another.


WORDPRESS - OUR NEW WEB PLATFORM
After considering the available options, we have decided that we will be switching our Web development platform from Drupal to Wordpress. Even though we have only been using Drupal for a short time, there were several reasons that we chose to do this now:

• While Drupal does offer tools that make it easier for non-technical personnel to change Web site content, it became evident that getting Drupal to meet our requirements would require some effort, and that the learning curve for developing a site was simply too high given our ambitious schedule. Using Wordpress should offer a much quicker development time -- around a week per site, vs. 3-4 weeks with Drupal.


• There are many more skilled Wordpress coders out there than there are Drupal coders, which gives us more options for contracting out some of the work.


• Using Wordpress should make it easier for region owners to set up their own region home page, which is the page that displays in the Web window when you enter a region.

With the switch to Wordpress, we will now focus on launching our upcoming sites quickly. This will include Biz-Grid, Edu-Merge, Veesome, Colony3D, and Homestone3D.

WEB WORLD NAMING CHANGES
Sometime after the first of the year, we will be changing the name of our corporate site to Worldworks.net, and this will become our corporate identity. We think that the name Worldworks will give us a more professional looking, less game-oriented front face for our interactions with business and educational users, and even with content creators.

We will continue to use the name "SpotON3D" as a community name, especially when working with those who have come here from other Web worlds such as Second Life, IMVU, Kaneva, Inworldz, etc. Members of these communities are familiar with the name SpotON3D, and therefore it only makes sense to continue using it for that purpose.

WEB WORLD ENTRY POINTS
Each Web world community will have its own entry point. Worldworks will become the main one, with portals containing information and possibly videos of each of the other worlds. Visitors will come through this portal, and can then choose which world they wish to enter -- Veesome, Biz-Grid, Edu-Merge, and other worlds as they become available. They will then be transported to the entry point for that community. At any point, they can always come back to the entry point of the community they are in, or back to the Worldworks entry point, and then go elsewhere. Or if someone knows exactly where they wish to go, they can always choose a location directly from the Destinations tab in their viewer.

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As a company, we are anxiously looking forward to 2012. We believe we have a great staff and a great community of residents, and because of that we will continue to grow by leaps and bounds.