Sidepodcast

A while ago we received an email from frequent commenter Dirty Scarab who kindly suggested that our header image could do with a bit of a makeover. Now we’re always up for a bit of constructive criticism, but this mail went one step further and supplied a set of replacement images too.

Quite honestly we were bowled over by the gesture, and now all that pesky racing business is out of the way, we’ve finally got a moment to use them. Thus, as from today the main Sidepodcast header has been refreshed.

If you like the design, we recommend you check out Scarab’s portfolio, there’s some seriously creative work to be found there and we thank him profusely for all his efforts. We’re also up for anyone else designing some alternate headers too, although the man has set a pretty high benchmark there.

In the meantime, we have another two designs which we’ll run in rotation until the end of the year, and after that it’ll be time for the annual website redesign. Which brings us nicely on to…

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Once again, we’re reviewing other people’s websites, this time looking closely at the teams to see how they fare. The first five can be found here, in Part 1 of the series, and this is Part 2, looking at the final five. I’ll be checking out how good they are from a fan’s point of view, whilst the geeky one will lift the hood on the technical bits.

Toyota

There’s more detail here about the car than anywhere I’ve seen so far, Toyota don’t seem afraid to share things with the fans. There’s an incredibly deep interactive experience looking at the team’s setup for Grands Prix, the motorhome, etc. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of connecting with their fans, but there are videos, images, wallpapers, and a nice set of features that will keep you reading for a short while.

Toyota’s site is stuffed to the rafters with content. With technical details, images, videos and an immersive factory tour, you’ll want make sure you have some free time before visiting this place.

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Several times last year, I felt like I was a one man marketing machine for Renault’s online F1 presence. Not a week went by it seemed without me extolling the virtues of the team’s blog, website or even their attempts to embrace Second Life.

This year on the other hand, there couldn’t be a more stark contrast in my opinions.

It all went wrong back in January when the team decided to split the ‘fan’ section from the ‘team’ section. Presumably this was to satisfy the sponsors and the groups legal team who were probably a bit uneasy about all those fans with their outspoken opinions.

Once the split had occurred though, things appeared to go from bad to worse.

Regarding the ‘fans’ section - after four months of waiting there still isn’t any form of news feed to track either blog updates or user comments, the picture submission section is rarely updated and despite many attempts of trying, the “submit an MP3 podcast” page has never yielded a successful response from ourselves or any other member of the public. It’s utterly, utterly useless.

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You can imagine that researching F1 Minute means I read a lot more news now than I used to. In fact, quite often, I’ll be talking to the man and he won’t know what I’m on about. Did you read that right? I’m ahead of him. Brilliant.

Anyway, I was browsing Autosport.com today, and saw the return of their traditional posts headed up Preview Quotes: #Team Name#. You know what that means, don’t you? The season is truly coming back. I was excited, I may have even whooped out loud. But then I saw that Autosport didn’t just have one post about the Previews. They’d managed to stretch it out to three posts.

I know this isn’t unusual for Autosport, we’ve certainly picked up on it in the past. I know a lot of other bloggers find their site very frustrating. I’ve been giving them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s starting to get a little bit ridiculous.

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During this week’s show we discussed the pending launch of official social networking sites from F1 teams Honda and Renault.

In the end, little came of earthdreams.info, but as our discussion was mostly based on speculation we can’t really blame the team for that. It may still happen, but at the moment it doesn’t look as though there will be much social dreaming from Honda in the short term.

Fan Site

Renault on the other hand did manage to launch their site. I couldn’t access it until today, a full two days after its promised debut, but I’m in now and that’s all that matters.

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