It has been almost a year since the last time I was sitting at the bench spending my time on this great hobby, and it has been crazy 12 months. Crazy in the most positive way there is! Not to bother you with my private life let me just write that a lot of amazingly positive things have happened during that time and now it is time for me to slowly but steadily get back to the hobby.
As it happens, when you get back after some time to something that you already know and love new energy and new ideas are coming along and it is not an exception this time. Of course, it is hard to say when and if all of the ideas will see the light of day as some of them will require a lot of time and effort, but hey - I will try to do my best.
Website
Couple of changes are coming to the website itself. Two main reasons for that are that firstly it is already 3 years old and secondly some changes are required to introduce new concepts I decided to try out.
Look & Feel
I am still quite found of the UI and Look & Fell of the website so I am not planning huge changes in that regard, though small upgrade in certain aspects would be advisable, like small improvements in navigation controls.
Background video
I am going to refresh background video. Current one only shows my first models, and I would like to add all newer builds and maybe change a bit transitions between photos. I am thinking about optional background music as well, though this is something I need to think through a bit more before I decide I want to add it.
Redesigned projects page
I am planning to redesign both pages, that is the list of finished models as well as pages showing detailed description of them. Currently I do not like much UI and navigation buttons on the list of models and project details page does not contain all information I would like to have there.
Support for multi language
In the future I would like to run webpage in both English and my native language Polish, though first I need to figure out best approach to do it efficiently - maybe it is time to play with chat GPT ;)
Extras for registered members
First, I would like to thank each of you guys for registering. It really means a lot to me! I know that currently there is not much you can do after registration and there are no any extras for you, that is why I would like to change it. I have already couple of ideas but let it be a misery for some time. You will fine out soon enough :)
Mobile version
This is big one. I would like to focus a lot of my attention on fixing all the issues which are currently there on the mobile version of the webpage. Looking at the statistics it clearly shows that more than half of visits come from mobile devices! Fixing existing issues is first step, next I would like to have proper design and UI which is dedicated to mobile devices.
Tutorials
I think it is high time for me to start creating a library of tutorials which would describe different techniques, ideas and tools used when building a scale model. Up until now when I was describing the process I tried to go into the details but not too much as I knew it would be kind of repeated with the next model (at least in most cases). Now with some experience and many different techniques used it seems much more reasonable to have tutorials describing those with high degree of detail which will be beneficial for someone who would like to master given process or technique and will allow me to focus more on specifics of the given model when writing posts “from the bench”.
I am not yet sure what will be the format of the tutorials, probably most of it I will figure out on the go. For sure I would like them to be very descriptive and step by step so that it brings a lot of value to you guys. Probably to achieve that I will need to try out recording videos - more on that in the section below.
Blog Posts
Up until now all of the posts where about showing progress and describing process of currently built model (except for the historical overview of the airframe). In the future I intent to write more stuff related to different scale modeling events, books reviews, tools reviews, interesting findings and subjects related with history of military aviation in general.
Videos
This is something entirely new for me so for sure it will take some trials and errors before I will be able to share this kind of updates with you. There are few aspects I need to research and learn, like what gear to buy, how to edit a raw video etc, but I think it is worth the effort. There is so much more you can show with this medium.
That is all for now folks. Changes mentioned above will be added progressively and as mentioned at the beginning I do not have any timeline for it.
Now I am getting back to mighty Ju-88 which was waiting over a year in the box. It is high time to finish riveting and move on and do landing gear and cockpit, so stay tuned as next update is coming.