For over 4 years now Armorama has been gathering modelers from all over the world who enjoy building, planning, and generally gabbing about scale modeling related topics. And still the pervasive sentiment is that Armorama is an armor/afv site. Even the military theme of the site has been pushed to the extremes with posts about cars, comic characters, space ships and more. And rightly so because as a "community" our interests vary a lot.

From an early stage of the site I saw a future for other sites like Armorama that would bring together topics for any area of interest our community had. And by focusing the core interest of the site more I wanted it to appeal to a broader range of modelers in that area. "What would cause a die-hard ship modeler start posting on Armorama?" I thought. Certainly we have a few of them but they were drawn here by the sense of community, not the massive array of topics and content for ships. Then it struck me that what we really had with this site was a balance of two great things; community and content management. Our community is one of the most helpful and friendly around. Also it's probably one of the most Internationally diverse of any hobby-related site on the net. That coupled with our software which allows users to post their own content, articles, photos and the like is what makes the site appeal to so many.

So as of this weekend, starting with the Warships area of the site, each section (save for Dioramas) will be given a site "home" of their own. These stand-alone sites will feature their own forums, reviews areas, homepages and more. Each site will have it's own staff management team of volunteers who will determine the best way for that site to move forward and appeal to the users of their modeling focus.

IMPORTANT FACTS

1. User logins will not vary from site to site. You may need to login to the ships site separately at first, but you can do so with the SAME login that you have used on Armorama or Kitmaker.

2. For the next 6 months there will be a lot of transition phases for these sites. THIS WILL BE A CHANGE IN CONSTANT FLUX. We ask that you bear with us while these sites take shape and we determine how best to present you the information and topics you are looking for.

3. Further details will be posted as they come available.

I will be happy to answer questions on this process but will try to answer a few here that I can guess.

Q. Why are you doing this beyond why you have described above?

A. As the site gets larger it's important to try to keep a manageable size of users and staff to avoid the trap of becoming top-heavy and slow to react to individuals and the membership as a whole. Also by allowing the site to have more space to grow we can continue to build on the community and sponsor-base of the site. More ship users means more ship review samples, more ship news articles, etc.

Q. Isn't this a lot of extra work for you?

A. Yes but my goal is to make this enterprise exactly that, a full-time pursuit. I am serious about making Armorama and affiliated sites a player in the future of online publishing and online communities for the hobby. In other words, we aren't going anywhere but up.

Q. Will this make finding a broad range of content harder? It's fairly easy to do that on Armorama now.

A. This is a tough question. Some might already say that Armorama is too big and it's hard to find things. But for the regular user of the site that's worried about change, I can promise that in the end, when all the dust settles, it will be just as easy to click to a single page and see what is new on the entire KitMaker Network. That is the goal. To have a home-base site that is what Armorama is now, and to let Armorama be what most people think it is now, the best Armor/AFV site on the Internet (and getting better every day!).

Thanks for reading!

Jim Starkweather
Publisher
KitMaker Network :-)