Editorial – A new Beginning

Launching a new website is a bit like giving birth to a new baby.  Of course, nothing compared to the real thing, but still, it’s both exciting and frightening.  Frightening because we are launching Badzine under a new platform that none of us, writers, have experimented with before, but Jeff, our Webmaster has done all the “dirty job” with all the coding stuff, while we – hopefully – will have to just put our articles online nice and easy.

Afraid, also, because this new website is a new beginning for Badzine. With a big recruitment drive that has started this summer, and hence, new expectations for what we can deliver to our readers.  We will try to stick to our plans and have monthly columns that we can keep up, make more interviews, have more videos done throughout the year with Badzine TV inserted in the website this time.  Our live chats will be done on a regular basis and bring you the best players, but also some officials to participate to these informal Rendez-vous online. The player database is still under construction but hopefully will bring out some exciting stuff to look out for.  We’ll keep some surprises coming your way – just bear with us.

Just like some links and functionalities are not yet ready, but we will implement them later – we wanted the kick off of these Yonex World Championships to start the new life of Badzine, which, by the way, switches to a new domain name  www.badzine.net – but don’t worry, you will be redirected  from the old domain name automatically.

So, first of all, I wish us all good luck, as the same crazy volunteers have vowed to make this website even better. We don’t count the hours of our free time we spend to bring you the best of badminton from all over the planet, and we do hope that you will be satisfied with what we deliver.  Give us your comments on the new layout, new functionalities and how you would like it to become even nicer.  We’re open for ideas, and contribution, of course (You can still become a member of the staff by answering this recruitment questionnaire).

So, we will make mistakes, have funny looking things online, but bear with us. We will make it better. I have a favour to ask, too. Make Badzine widely known. Help us publicize it. Promote it, through your Facebook, Twitter and other social network accounts. Put our logo on your website or blog, using our rss feeds (for free!).  Basically, we all do it because we love the sport, and because we hope our readers will like it through our words and images.  Making the website more known and famous is our only reward…

That’s it for now.  We will be putting live images, live audio files, live articles all throughout the week, here in Paris.  So long Badzine, welcome Badzine…