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The RedRants.com Makeover

I was tempted to call this post ‘Rebuilding RedRants.com’ but then I remembered that we don’t need to rebuild anything – the house that RR built has strong foundations and a great view of the game (and all things United). There’s no need to ‘re-do’.

What we need is to adapt to the fact that it’s not going to be (for some time at least) a one-person game. That means that we’ll have multiple writers, and we will have guest writers from outside RR and from within the community too. But before we add more writers, we must remember that all writers / submitted entries will be vetted for quality and at the end of the day, they should be published on merit, not on the basis of how long you’ve been a part of the site.

Secondly the site badly needs to be freshened up – design, some new features. Again we’re not going to change what works – so this won’t turn into a magazine-style site or a forum where everything is separate. We’ll just update it to look better and work faster.

So, a quick checklist of things we’ll be doing (and things we won’t be doing):

Not To Do:

The site won’t change in it’s style or primary focus. This means that:

1. We won’t change the quality criteria for posting articles on the site.
2. The current format (blog + discussion in comments) stays – no need to move to a different style (magazine or forum).
3. The community will be open and self-policing. There will be, for obvious reasons, less ‘policing’ than before, so hopefully everyone can be on their best behavior (or keep the rest in line ‘politely’ when they are not).

To Do:

1. A daily post – we won’t have 5 posts a day, but we won’t have 2 posts a week either. The 1 post a day gives us a nice balance (and also encourages readers – the less vocal ones – to return to the site every day to get updates). Right now we’re slowly moving things up – 3-4 / week – and we’ll work on meeting that daily post mark next month.

2. Facelift – the site needs a new design and better integration of social media features like facebook / twitter.

As you can gather from the ‘very’ short list, things won’t change – rather, they will return to and build on the same methods and processes that were active when RR was top of the league (with some adjustments).

Writing For RedRants

There’s only one criteria – that the article must be well-written and match the values of the site. The word of the editor will be final and contributions will be judged on merit, not based on ‘who deserves to write here because of their history’ and who doesn’t. The fact is, writing a blog and participating in a community are two very different things – that’s why there’s thousands of us and only one RR 🙂

If you need to get a feel for what type of content / style is acceptable, read through the archives. Anyone who wants to write for RR is welcome to email in a sample and their plans (how often they want to write, what they want to write about) to admin@redrants.com. All articles will be reviewed / vetted before publication, editor has final say and may choose to refuse to publish an article.

What’s also true is that once you’re accepted and you continue to do well, it’s quite likely that you’ll be allowed to post regularly on the site. That’s the case with Eddie / David.

RR will still be manning the Twitter account so you can speak to him there if you want (or leave a message for him on Facebook). As for everything else, it’s a new start, we have excellent foundations to build upon so let’s make RedRants.com as good as we know it can be.

PS – you’re likely to see more pretty girls here now that RR’s gone 🙂 Some of them will be showing up later this week, so stay tuned…

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