Manufacturer's Forums

[Aaron Koehl]

New Forums at SawmillCreek!

You undoubtedly may have noticed a new forum here at SawmillCreek. With our continued growth and increased consumption of bandwidth, we are headed for really exciting times.

While Hampton Roads Online currently provides the bulk of our sponsorship, in order to manage our anticipated growth we are opening our doors to the creation of Manufacturer's Forums.

New Forums
The new forums, while not designed to be a vehicle for bulk advertising (ick! spam!), sponsors will be given the opportunity to post new product announcements, answer questions related to their products, link to their sites, and otherwise have an interface to our SawmillCreek community. These sponsors will pay a monthly fee to offset our growing hosting and bandwidth costs, and through your interactions with the manufacturers, you will be able to support SawmillCreek as we grow.

Further Benefit
Many technical questions, product ideas, and other innovations are posed to manufacturers and retailers every day. By posting these questions publicly and allowing the manufacturers and retailers to respond, we should all be able to benefit from each others' knowledge.

We are currently only considering manufacturers who provide woodworking-related products and services--those who will be able to give direct benefit to our users. We will try out a few forums at first to see how it goes. I don't anticipate "dirtying up" our forums, and the manufacturers will still adhere to our TOS with a few exceptions.

Details
Please contact me for details on pricing (Administrator, Aaron Koehl).

I would encourage all of you to contact any sponsors who you would like to see have an official presence here at SawmillCreek.

As you can see, our first sponsor is Northwind Associates, the company owned by SawmillCreek's founder, Keith Outten. Stay tuned for some exciting new products and services coming shortly!

[Jeff Sudmeier]

Aaron,

I think this is great news! I would think that the manufacturers would be very open to it as well! Having an open forum of their own on SMC with it's >4,000 members should be a great advertising option for them! Finally, it seems like a win-win because we will get personalized support from them.

[David Fried]

Kind of like advertising in a magazine - sometimes I buy the magazine for the ads. best of all I don't pay for this magazine. I think it's a great idea to ensure the continued health of the creek.

[Frank Pellow]

I think that these forums are a good idea and I hope that they work out the way that I expect them to.

[Jeremy Bracey]

Thanks for the great site. Your creativity has both grown the site into a great communitity and now found an exciting way to pay for it. I for one have been waiting for an interface to some manufacturers.

[Mike Hedges]

Sound great to.... should be helpful

[mike malone]

Good idea AAron!!!
best/mike