My Forum Introduction: Chicago, IL

[Mobile Cuisine]

Good morning everyone,

My name is Richard Myrick, I am the editor-in-chief of Mobile Cuisine Magazine. MCM is what I hope to be my break into the world of journalism. After years of work as an architect in the retail industry, I lost my job due to corporate downsizing.

I have always loved writing, and while in architecture school had one of my English instructors try to get me to change majors to journalism. I guess it was a mistake not to listen to him, but none the less, I did ignore him, until now.

I am a foodie at heart, and when watching The Great Food Race on Food Network, my wife and I got the idea to look into starting up a food truck in Chicago. To my surprise, I found that there was no central place to gather information on the industry. Sure there were individual blogs posts, and news stories, but nothing in regards to a trade magazine. *cue light bulb graphic*

Last month, I started a blog on the subject and started researching how I could create an online ezine. Once I started posting (wordpress.com) I quickly started to see my site stats increase. From what I had read, I should not be discouraged if the site took anywhere from 3-6 months to break the 100 unique daily visitors barrier. What was I to think when I hit that number after 1 week? Since then, during the week, I am averaging 150-300 visitors a day with 50-100 visits on the weekends. A friend of mine has already suggested I leave wordpress.com for a site that allows for monetizing, so I have been researching this for the last couple of days.

The problem I have is that I am a complete website design newbie so I will be limited in what I can do on my own, and my budget for site design is nothing at this point.

My questions to you...

Can you suggest an ezine platform that is user friendly and something I can fully integrate a community forum and classified section into the site?

I started playing around with wordpress.org however I have yet to find a forum software that will integrate into my site and transition cleanly, and not look like an add-on feature.

I look forward to your answers and advice. Also, please feel free to review my current site (see signature) I have a very thick skin and take criticisms quite well, so if you have one, please share it.

[vangogh]

Welcome to the forum Richard. Sorry to hear about the downsizing, but glad to hear it hasn't slowed you down. If anything it sounds like it's leading you to something you really want to do. Maybe it's all for the good in the long run.

Interesting idea about the trade magazine and glad to see you're online as well.

I like WordPress myself, however I prefer the self hosted WordPress instead of using WordPress.com. If you go to WordPres.org (http://www.wordpress.org) you can download WordPress for installation on most any hosting account. Even easier is to look for a web host that has enabled the one click install. The majority of web hosts will have this set up by default. You have to pay for the hosting which should be at most $10/month at first, but WordPress is still free and there are plenty of free and commercial magazine style themes that you can add without too much difficulty.

Part of why I'm recommending it is that it's also relatively easy to add a forum to WordPress. WordPress also makes bbPress (http://www.bbpress.org) which is forum software you can connect to your WP blog. At the moment it's still a bit of work to install it, but if you don't mind waiting another month or two it will be much easier. They're working on bbPress to turn it into a plugin that is much more easily added to WordPress.

There's another option which is to add the BuddyPress (http://www.buddypress.org) plugin. BuddyPress is like adding a social network to a WordPress site. It also included bbPress if you want to add both. bbPress won't be on by default, but it's another click or two after the BuddyPress install. It's not too hard to add and there are a few of us here who work a lot with WordPress so we can help walk you through if you encounter problems.

If you click through to either the bbPress link or the BuddyPress links above you can get a good feel for what each is about. Both should have a gallery of sites using each so you can see how they'll look on a site.

If the budget means you're going to do all the work, know there's going to be a learning curve to all of this. That will be true with any application though. WordPress is for the most part fairly easy to use and even work on if you don't mind learning a bit about coding. And again a few of us, myself included, work extensively with WordPress and can likely help you through most problems you may encounter.

Glad to have you here and thanks for joining the community.

[KristineS]

Welcome Richard. I have to second Vangogh on the self hosted Wordpress recommendation. There are also several themes that are magazine type themes, so you should have any problem finding one that will work for your magazine.

[ParaTed2k]

Welcome to the forums Richard! Way to go for seeing and empty market and working to fill it! I look forward to reading what you have to say.

Let's see what we can learn from each other.

[cbscreative]

Welcome to the SBF, and I hope the diversity of experience here helps you a lot in your new venture.

[Business Attorney]

Richard, welcome to the forum from another Chicagoan.

I had a client that planned to buy and operate several food trucks a few years ago. It didn't work out for him, but he had gathered a lot of information. I didn't realize that there was no single source of information on the industry. It sounds like you have found an interesting niche to write about.

Good luck to you.

[Mobile Cuisine]

Richard, welcome to the forum from another Chicagoan.

I had a client that planned to buy and operate several food trucks a few years ago. It didn't work out for him, but he had gathered a lot of information. I didn't realize that there was no single source of information on the industry. It sounds like you have found an interesting niche to write about.

Good luck to you.

Chicago is a tough place to try to operate. Right now there are less than 10 trucks or carts that are legal. The laws in place in the city do not allow for someone to prepare anything in the truck. It makes it tough for hotdog vendors to even operate. I am happy to see Evanston recently changed their laws to allow them, I hope that Chicago follows suit. I know I will be watching the mayoral elections closely and make sure to speak with each of the candidates to get their stances on the issue.

[Business Attorney]

Chicago is a tough place to try to operate. Right now there are less than 10 trucks or carts that are legal. The laws in place in the city do not allow for someone to prepare anything in the truck. It makes it tough for hotdog vendors to even operate. I am happy to see Evanston recently changed their laws to allow them, I hope that Chicago follows suit. I know I will be watching the mayoral elections closely and make sure to speak with each of the candidates to get their stances on the issue.

That's right. My client's plans were for a couple of specific suburban locations for that very reason.

[Blessed]

Welcome to the forum Richard!

My cousin lives in Chicago and is really enjoying it - he is one of the primary song writers and plays guitar for, lePercolateur (http://www.lepercolateur.com/) one of the local Gypsy Jazz bands out there!

[SEOHelp]

Welcome to the forum and good luck with your magazine.
You will find a lot of nice people on this forum.

[Harold Mansfield]

Hi Richard,
Welcome to the forum.
(I am biased, but ) I have to agree that if this is a "do it and manage it yourself" project, that (self hosted) Wordpress is going to be your best bet, especially if you want a magazine style layout.
Quite a few Food blogs/websites are published on Wordpress as well as many top online magazines.
Examples:
Serious Eats: A Food Blog and Community (http://www.seriouseats.com/)
Laura's Best Recipes (http://laurasbestrecipes.com/)
A Man Obsessed with Food, Drink, and Everything Inbetween - MattBites.com (http://mattbites.com/)
The Basic Cookbook | Recipes and Video Cooking Tutorials from award winning Chef Volundur Volundarson (http://www.thebasiccookbook.com)

[jamesray50]

Hi Richard, Welcome! You have found a great resource here. I love being a member of this forum. I really liked The Great Food Race. I hope they do another show. I thought sure the chinese team would win since they had won every leg of the race. I was surprised when they didn't.

I looked at your website and found it interesting. I don't give reviews since I am also new at creating websites, but I do have a question about your site. Why do you have two rows of menu buttons on the top, one above your header and one below your header? I almost didn't see the one above because the fonts are dark and don't light up until the cursor is over them. But I didn't understand the logic behind that and why there were two rows.

[Mobile Cuisine]

To be honest, the locations of the pages and categories is theme based. Unfortunately I do not have enough programming knowledge to make changes to them, but I agree with the top being too dark. I have a message into the theme designer to see if they can give me the code to modify that area.

[Harold Mansfield]

Richard,
I tried to move your request for a review of your site over to the review section and lost it somewhere. My bad.
Can you re post that over in the Review section for us?
Website Reviews (http://www.small-business-forum.net/website-reviews/)

Thanks,
I do have a few tips for you.