No, I did not say the birth of a forum, I said the birth of a "website".

"What's the difference?" you ask? Let's see if I can explain.

Of course the first thing you see when you first loaded woodworkerszone.com into your browser, is the forum that we have set up. So yes, it's quite obvious that we are a web forum. As a matter of fact, we've put some pretty serious time and money into setting up a very robust forum on the most popular forum software out there. But the forum is merely a means to an end for us (at least for the vision we have).

The forum happens to be a very efficient tool to build a website around. Think of it as the brains behind the operation. Everything that we have planned for this place will be based off of the user login controlled by the forum software. Does that mean that we don't want you to post in the forum and join in??? ABSOLUTELY NOT. The most valuable part of any website, is the content. I can assure you that neither me or my esteemed colleague are capable of providing the massive quantity of information that we would like to someday see housed within the confines of woodworkerszone.com. For that, we want to rely on our most valuable resource: YOU.

Forums, by their very definition, are an inefficient means of cataloging information. Log onto any of the dozens of woodworking forums out there and you will immediately know what I am talking about. After a very short time, it becomes a gigantic mass of uncategorized knowledge, held together by the weak search engines built into the forum software. And in MANY cases, that knowledge dies an ungraceful death after a predetermined amount of time. That is where our vision kicks in...

Woodworkerszone.com will eventually have a variety of "modules" that are most important to woodworkers like yourself. It's starting with the wiki. Much like it's very, very big brother wikipedia.org, the WoodworkersZone wiki will eventually be a destination to look up virtually everything you could ever want to know about woodworking. We also plan to start a database of tool reviews. Both comprehensive tool reviews contributed by our small staff, our friends, or any contributor out there who would like to give one a shot, and also a broader "user reviews" section. One that uses a simple rating system with short write-ups from the owner. And as you may have already noticed, we already have a blogging feature running for anyone to write a woodworking blog of their own, and have it actually reside in a place where other woodworkers will find it.

We are also in the preliminary stages of finding talented woodworkers, who also like to write, to contribute articles to be displayed on our homepage. Think of the Zone as a woodworking magazine of sorts... only purely in a digital state, with content not from a staff of paid contributors, but from anyone who wants contribute.

It may look like a mess right now, but please check back frequently as we continue to build not only the content, but the community that contributes the content.