Welcome to the New Website!

As the webmaster for the Indy Media Artists group, I wanted to welcome all of our new users to the website! I hope all of you will take the time to create an account and become as active here as you are in the meetups.

Here are a couple of the new items:

Members Area - Members of all areas are welcome to join. Paid members will receive a "Premium Member" level that will give them access to the member benefits and other areas that are restrictred to the Premium Members.

Member Blog - All members may make blog posts. Currently blog posts must be approved by an administrator before they are posted for the group. As time goes on this area will be great for finding additional information for topics touched on at the meetups. Please make sure that these posts are relevant to the group and beneficial to others and it will help to ensure that your blog post gets approved!

Online Registeration - Members can register for the group online! The forms that you normally fill out at the meetups can be completed here on the Registration Page. If you want to become a Premium Member, you can bring your payment to the group meeting. In the near future, we will have the ability for users to pay right in the registration form!

Online Reviews - All members will have access to create a review for the give-aways from the meetups. We are hoping that this will make it easier to return your reviews of software and books to the group and in turn make it easier for us to get more prizes!

Resources - There is now a reasources area of the website. Any member can contribute to the resources and can also rate and comment on them. The resources are organized by Tags (similar to the blog posts) to make them easier to find.

Tagging - Blog posts, resources, and reviews can vary in content, so we have incorporated a "Tagging" system to help group similar topics. Please remember to tag your blog posts (even more than one tag) by seperating them by commas in the field. If a Tag already exists, the system will try to "pre-populate" the tag, so type slowly and make sure you are not creating duplicate tags!

Rating and Voting - We've implemented a 5-star rating system for the reviews and resources. Any member can not only comment on these, but rate them to let others know how useful these items are. This will also help us as Group Managers to better evaluate the interest levels of our group.