I used to seek out and write coverage of new and upcoming conventions. I stopped doing that because I had no time; however, if anyone wishes to take on that beat, it's there. We also accept newsletters and announcements, with the understanding that they will be tagged as such and edited like any other post.
It is not hard to get published on Flayrah. Our contributors are not hand-picked; they registered and submitted a story. Our "staff writers" were crazy enough to do so more than once.
Hopefully your designer is able to integrate your social outposts into the new website. We don't have a Twitter widget here because it would effectively duplicate our posts/Newsbytes, but it makes a lot of sense for a convention, etc. What you want is core content (including forums) on your site, not spread out all over the place - but if something pops up elsewhere, it should be available somehow on the site as well. Not an easy task, I know.
Now, a sidenote: I get real tetchy when conventions throw their web presence away, sometimes every year. They're dumping their Google rankings and making it harder for their members. I understand that staff change, but it's not a good excuse to switch frameworks at the drop of the hat. Heck, when we changed to Drupal, I made sure to keep the old content alive, and the old URLs working. Anthrocon handles this properly; they update pages and their URLs don't change from year to year.
I used to seek out and write coverage of new and upcoming conventions. I stopped doing that because I had no time; however, if anyone wishes to take on that beat, it's there. We also accept newsletters and announcements, with the understanding that they will be tagged as such and edited like any other post.
It is not hard to get published on Flayrah. Our contributors are not hand-picked; they registered and submitted a story. Our "staff writers" were crazy enough to do so more than once.
Hopefully your designer is able to integrate your social outposts into the new website. We don't have a Twitter widget here because it would effectively duplicate our posts/Newsbytes, but it makes a lot of sense for a convention, etc. What you want is core content (including forums) on your site, not spread out all over the place - but if something pops up elsewhere, it should be available somehow on the site as well. Not an easy task, I know.
Now, a sidenote: I get real tetchy when conventions throw their web presence away, sometimes every year. They're dumping their Google rankings and making it harder for their members. I understand that staff change, but it's not a good excuse to switch frameworks at the drop of the hat. Heck, when we changed to Drupal, I made sure to keep the old content alive, and the old URLs working. Anthrocon handles this properly; they update pages and their URLs don't change from year to year.