NF500 is our new Bambina. NF500 launched on the 3rd of July 2007, one day before the official public unveiling of the new Fiat Cinquecento which took place in Turin, Italy.
NF500 was founded with the intention of covering new Fiat 500 news and events exclusively, in a clear and simple Blog format. While the Fiat 500 has it's own corporate website, and the original Fiat 500 has an extremely strong and enthusiastic community, we sensed a demand for pure new 500 news, without so much of the corporate angle you always encounter via official sources.
NF500 is a fledging site and who knows where it will lead to, but it's fun to try something fresh.
Launched in 2001, spawned from a classic Mini site where the members made it clear they didn't want the new MINI on their territory (yes, it really was that bad).
MINI2 quickly became the leading resource for everything new MINI, and several years later is firmly established as the largest and most visited MINI publication in any format.
MINI2 requires reporting from international and national media drives of the new MINI, editorials to be written, monitoring and administration of the forums, and maintain, update and create the backend.
MINI2 was acquired by AutoForums.com late in 2007, so there's no need to lose sleep over it anymore, but before the sale Trained Monkeys also had to promote the site, deal with email enquiries, sell and maintain banner advertising and sponsorship, and handle all marketing and promotion. Quite a bit really.
The website itself is pretty basic, we realise that. But the MINI2 Charity Ball, and the thousands of pounds it has raised for good causes makes us very proud all the same.
If you represent a big corporation (or even a small one), that could help the MINI2 Charity Ball, drop by the website and offer your support, we'll love you for it!
Real life and the online world collide... Ah-hem, anyway, this site started as a place to make notes and record our (mis)adventures into the world of Self Build.
As it turned out, 'A Plot' opened our eyes to blogging and blogging software. In particular just how simple it is to work with and work on, and gave us the final push towards launching the Motorcade. It also pushed us to open up a Flickr account of our own. How very Web 2.0.
MINI2 had a blogging service available to its members. The Blogs were tacked on to the vBulletin forum software. Despite attempts to improve the basic package, when all was said and done it was pretty rubbish.
The reason it wasn't up to scratch is you cant build on the wrong foundations and expect great results, so the answer was the Motorcade.
A dedicated blogging service for new all car enthusiasts built on the powerful Wordpress platform. Still finding its feet, as with MINI2 all those years ago the Motorcade is the first of its kind, filling a unique niche among the masses of blogging services out there. We believe, doing it with a little style.