Hastings Supporters Forum - 100% Unofficial!

Wondered when Phil might start this thread.. :) TBH generally we have had a huge amount of very postive feedback and some people who are really into their programmes and buy every issue have emailed and tweeted regularly after games and mentiond that they thought it was pretty good and have offered to help contribute towards it as well which is great and also some constructive critisism which we positivly encourage.

I think we're 6 programmes into this now of something that neither Liam or myself have any experince of whatsoever but we do certainly have lots of enthusiasm. 
Yes there have been mistakes and errors, some down inexperience and not haveing the eye for proofreading 100% as yet, some dowm to some very tight deadlines ( for instance we had 5 hours straight to write from scratch the Folkestone issue due to a unfortunate personal circumstance at another end and didnt even know if the game was on until 4.45PM on the Saturady with the deadline early the next morning, worked until midnight on that and met the deadline ), Also at this level some of the clubs ( not all ) provide little in the way of player details and background which makes it very difficult to produce detailed info on their squad.

We're not experienced programme editors and dont claim to be and trust me no-one is more pissed off with ourselves more than when after checking and checking the thing little errors pop up.

We alsways knew that Simon would be an exceptionally hard act to follow as he has had around 7 seasons worth of expereince editoring it and we have had just 6 matches so far.

As Fatbloke mentions we are encouraged that sales are actually up on last years matches with around 100 or so sold each match which we are very happy with.

Two things we cannot really change is the fact it is black and white and the number of adverts which generlly as you can imagine contribute vital funds to the club but additionally there are several more league sponsor ads etc that the club is onliged to carry ( particularly full page adds ) However eventually we would like to add possible another 4 sides of content by adding two more pages so we can include more items on a regular basis like Ryman League Round Up, more interviews and colums from NLP etc. )

The club have had quotes on producing it full colour but it is much more expensive to produce one thsi big in full colour and this was probably proved by the fact that the Walton Casuals programme the other day was indeed colour but was just 8 pages long for the same cost of £2.... wheras ours is 56 pages albeit in B&W

Anyway we will continue to try our best and learn from any errors and mistakes and are sure that as we gain experience we will be producing better programmes that improve week after week until one day we might get nearly as good as Simon!

Some of the new features such as 5 from a fan have been particularly well recived from the people that mention it but we actually need people like PhilG to contribute their experimces to it to make it interesting!

As Simon mentoned to me its a tough job to do and very easy to criticise but not so easy for someone to take up the challenge to do it as the role of programme editor was advertised for over 2 months with no responses before we decided to take over from Simon of what was becoming a job too far for someone who puts most of his waking moments into the club.

Massive thanks to the 100 or so that buy them each week and as always look forward to hearing your 'constructive' thoughts on them and can promise that we're always looking to make each one better than the last.

Cheers