As we discussed last night, I'd like to spend the next month or so discussing the direction we'd like to take the group's web presence in the future.

The way I see it, we have two options:

1. Keep things the way they are. That would mean maintaining sierrammug.org and this site as two separate entities.

2. Dump sierrammug.org as a separate entity. We would keep the domain name (once it gets renewed :)) but have it redirect here, so that this would become the only "official" website for the group.

My thoughts on the points above:

The reality is that the services provided here mean that this site is going to have much more current and "live" content, so if we go with option #1, the sierrammug.org would continue to serve the basic purpose it serves today: as a page with the meeting annoucement. The remaining pages on the site, which I suspect few if any active members ever visit (my poll last night seemed to indicate that while new members take a moment to look through the site, existing members don't), would not likely continue to be updated. For example, the events calendar page (which is continually out of date as it is) would be dropped, and people would be directed here for that information.

The real issue here is the membership email list. I cannot import the list we currently have into this site. If we switch over to this site as our only presence, everyone who wishes to continue getting email announcements will have to come in and register here.

While my initial reaction when I was informed about groups.adobe.com was that we definitely needed to keep our separate presence, I have recently come to the conclusion that I think option #2 above is the better option. As I mentioned last night, my real concern in switching over was losing members: we officially have 229 folks on the mailing list, and as I said I cannot import that into this site. However, in sending out the messages for this month's meeting, I was able to observe (because I had to do it manually through my own account) that an extremely high number of those addresses are invalid. I unfortunately did not keep a count, but it was easily in the range of 30-50.

But the other factor is the reality of our membership numbers versus the number on that list. We may have 150-175 people receiving email, but those who attend regularly know that we in fact have an *active* membership of something like 30-40 people, and even that number may be a bit on the generous side. So if we drop sierrammug as the front-end to the group and switch over here entirely, I believe that it is safe to assume that our "official" number will drop from 229 (which we've already decided isn't "real") to 30-50.

But is that a worse-case scenario? Is that necessarily a bad thing? Do we need to send email announcements to a ton of people who aren't going to respond and attend the meeting anyway? Again, my reaction two months ago would have been "yes", but I'm increasingly unsure.

Another advantage to option #2. As I explained last night, we have the somewhat cumbersome "Sierra Multimedia User Group" name (or as I prefer to call it, "Sierra Adobe Multimedia User Group", because I think it's important to have "Adobe" in there) only because we were originally the Sierra Macromedia User Group. So the current name was only an attempt to keep the acronym, and that in turn was only done to keep the domain name. If we are going to move away from sierrammug.org as our main web presence, then there would no longer be any reason to keep the name, either, and it would provide a chance (if we want it) to totally rebrand ourselves. So that's another thing to keep in mind.

So please join in the discussion here and share your thoughts. For now, we will go with what we're doing already, which is option #1.

Thanks.