Alpaca-Friends

Introducing Alpaca-Friends

If you are interested in alpacas then you are already an "Alpaca-Friend".

Here you can talk about all things alpaca, ask questions and help answer them, arrange meetings and advertise events and your relevant products and services.

If this is your first time here come on in to the forum where we all share knowledge, help the less experienced and have a good time getting to know each other.

If you are new to alpacas, then you've come to the right place! The forum is a great place to pose questions to the old hands and look up the advice already there.

If you're thinking about getting your own alpacas you probably have many queries, don't worry you're not entering uncharted teretory, we've been there before! You can read about the experiences of other Alpaca-Friends and ask us all about it. We also recommend you visit some of us who have alpacas, it will be a great learning experience for you and we'll enjoy having you over for a chat.

You can find out who's close to you on the Alpaca-Friends map. (to be added later)

You can also find out about meetings and other events on the calendar.

Additional benefits

Whether you already have experience with alpacas or not we hope you'll register with Alpaca-Friends.

Registration is optional at Alpaca-Friends but we recommend it, (most other forums won't let you post messages without registering first), the simple reason is it makes it easier for you to use and for us regulate the forum. All registration requires is a working email address you have access to and you can choose a username that will be exclusive to you, and enjoy the following additional benefits:

• Email updates for important messages (optional);
• Your own promotional web page with a profile of you (and your business);
• Personal Message system to send and receive private messages within the Alpaca-Friends web site;
• Optional space for a web log and photo gallery (under development, may cost extra in the future);

Alpaca-Friends: now and the future.

Alpaca-Friends is a community and this web site is the communication hub (augmenting traditional means of communication and central location for information), but it should also raise awareness of alpacas, promoting you and the growing alpaca industry in England.

More information about this Alpaca-Friends and the plan for the web site can be found below, but first we draw attention to the evolutionary nature of Alpaca-Friends' web site: your usage patterns and comments will determine how it develops.

Feedback is appreciated and encouraged, as is participation in the forum and regular returns to this web site.

Web site development

Stage one of the this web site is complete - a working forum is up and running.

We started off by installing ready-made generic forum software from www.simplemachines.org, and although it claimed to be easy to customise this was far from our experience. We would have built a forum from scratch but that would take too much time up-front, now the time will be spent working with the over-complex forum code, but at least we can all use it in the mean time!

Stage two will offer improved functionality as well as completely new features such as the Alpaca-Friends map and personal profile pages. While also integrating the forum software with the web site (instead of the web site being grafted on top of the forum) and clearing up the remaining undesirable simplemachines.org default settings.