11/05/2010 - Turn It On Again!

4editors It's been a long long time ...

Yes, we're back again. In fact, we haven't been gone at all, we simply focused on our German website. But since late 2008 (!) we have silently been working on making the English website look as our german website does. For those who don't know, "we" are the team of the German Genesis Fanclub it, which was founded in 1991. Details about the team can be found here.

Relaunch ... why?

Our old English version of the website was established in 2004. The goal was to provide a news-service such as earlier Genesis sites like Genesis Path or The Way We Walk did. It was a sideproject for us, since we were all very busy in Germany. Then, we received a lot of requests to publish the content of our German website in English as well. So we started to add translations of reviews, articles, interviews etc. on genesis-news.com. Shortly after that, the question was - why not a forum? So we added that as well ...

Then, Genesis reunited in 2006/2007 and the site was heavily frequented. We installed the blog (that was temporary and won't be part of the new site) and updated the forum software. After the tour, and with an official Genesis website established at the time, we focused on our German website again and didn't update genesis-news.com a lot. The reasons for that are obvious. Quite a few Genesis sites are online, and with genesis-fanclub.de we have one of the largest websites ourselves which required all the attention (and a fanclub behind that that needs attention as well) and last but not least - our time is limited since it is a spare time project.

Nevertheless, we always kept the possibility in mind to give genesis-news.com the same facelift that genesis-fanclub.de got in 2008. Since then, Martin Klinkhardt (you'll find him on the forum as "martinus") has translated virtually EVERY article from our German website. Some of them are still offline and will be added subsequently. When we felt it was time to take the final steps, the official site was closed down. This was the last argument to finally relaunch. Now we are back ... to be more precise, our international website is back. Welcome and enjoy ...

"All change"? Yes, a bit ...

As mentioned above it takes a lot of time to run such websites. It would not be possible to restart such an international site with a little help from some friends. One of them is Martin Klinkhardt, who is responsible for translating reviews and articles from our German website for you. Then we are very happy to introduce Thomas Holter (for those of you with a long fan-memory: yes, it's him!) from Norway. Thomas will focus on general monitoring and news that may be less interesting for German fans, but VERY interesting for those of you living outside Germany. Then there is the core team. Helmut Janisch is responsible for all design issues related to this website plus management, Christian Gerhardts will coordinate the content of the website and manage user accounts, Peter Schütz works on upcoming databases of songs and concerts/tours and Bernd Zindler is responsible for questions related to video footage. All of us are editors, of course. A detailed description and contact data can be found here.

That's the team ...

What you can expect

To make this clear in the very beginning: This is not about competing with other Genesis websites. We're all friends and sit in the same boat. The German Genesis Fanclub always had a great contact and communication with, for example, Dave (worldofgenesis.com), Simon (genesis-movement.org), Mario (Dusk) and all the other fan-projects around. We simply have the material of nearly 400 articles in English language that are (and will be made) available on the website now and we just think they should be available for you. We have some projects running that you might find useful once they go live. And we are all dedicated fans. This is for you, that's why.

1. News Service

They may quickly become the core of the project - the news. We offer news feeds and twitter news to you if you want to. "Follow us on twitter" can be found in every news item, the rss feed is available via the usual icon in your browser. There is also a Facebook Group - in fact, two of them - one in German (here) and one in English for genesis-news.com (here). If you think we have missed something, send in news - just go to the forum and send a message to Thomas, Martin or Christian (or emails instead). A Newsletter Service is not planned at this point.

2. Forum

Ah yes, a forum. It's here for you and we hope you will use it. Anybody who registers (it's free, of course), will also have the opportunity to participate in games, polls and competitions we will offer on our main website. It is very important to mention that none of your data is accessible for others and will not be made available to anybody at any time! Besides forum registration and possible competitions, we will never ask for personal data. We will surely NEVER ask for financial data like credit card numbers. If you see something like that happen, be sure it is SPAM (and let us know so we can try and do something about it)!

3. Reviews

Our goal is to review everything that's released in the Genesis cosmos. As we all have limited time capacities, we cannot cover everything. So, if you want to contribute a review, let us know!

4. Interviews

We have conducted a lot of interviews in the last 20 years. We will continue to do that and these interviews will also be published on genesis-news.com.

5. Gig reviews and tour dates

We will keep you informed about upcoming shows and will also publish reviews of concerts and tours.

6. Specials

Be sure to check the front page - we will always offer some special articles with intersting stories.

We won't stop when it comes to solo projects. Every current (?) and former member of the band is worth being mentioned and we even stretch it further. Have you ever thought about what people like David Rhodes or Nick Magnus are doing these days? Well, here you will find out!

Bugs ... a competition

Of course we tried to eliminate every bug on the website. But, suprise surprise - we may have failed ... now it's your turn. We give away three posters of the Steve Hackett Event 2009, signed by Steve Hackett, John Hackett, Roger King and Nick Magnus. If you want to win one of the posters, simply send us bug reports to gnc-bugs@genesis-fanclub.de until July 15th 2010. The following issues are considered as bugs:

- broken links
- wrong links
- articles, news and anything else in German language
- failure messages of any kind
- major layout bugs
- any other incident that should not occur.

Please describe the bug and it may help to send a screenshot. In the end we will use your emails to improve the performance of this website. We will notify the three winners via email - good luck!