Print is dead and my website sucks

After looking over the responses (blogpost comments & emails) to my recent call for help regarding advertising, a few things *kinda* stand out:

1: The bulk of advertising suggestions are for web advertising rather than magazine

2: My website sucks in terms of layout and accessibility

3: I should sign up for Facebook and/or Tumblr and/or Twitter and use social media to Get The Word Out.

OK. Taking them in order:

1: I still think print ads make sense… I suspect there’s a disconnect between people who read magazines and people who surf the web. Shrug.

2: Yes, indeed it sucks. It’s the very lamest in late 1990’s web scribbling technique. So, here’s what I’m proposing… yet another contest. One hundred dollars ($100.00) in downloads- cuz I’ve got stuff more than I have money – to whoever cobbles together a set of webpages to replace the current pages. What I guess I’d need is a new front page and a page replicating the Drawings & Documents and/or the APR pages. These pages would need to include everything the current pages do… all the data, and of course they’d need to be able to be updated *by* *me.* As for the individual product pages, I’m planning on switching to linking to individual blog posts for each product, as demonstrated by my recent posting of a number of the Air Drawing sets. I’ll add the submissions to my website, and, assuming that I get a number of good ones, I’ll let all y’all decide which is the best layout.

3: Meh. I suppose I gotta. I’ve avoided Facebook for all the reasons laid out on the “South Park” episode, and I’ve always seen Twitter as being basically this:

But… I guess I’ll break down and sign up for ’em. Several suggestions were to set up some sort of group or something, and dump a bunch of aerospace images on it with links back to up-ship.com/blog, and hope that they go viral. Well, I guess it’s worth a shot.

But if I get sucked into some horrible vortex of time-wastage…