2010 Forensics Season: What's Ahead at ForCom!
Dear Forensicator Friends,
We have some very exciting plans for the upcoming 2010 season. You can expect to see the following new developments on ForCom over the coming weeks:
1) Redesign! We will be redesigning the entire website and providing it with a fresh, captivating face. The redesign includes a fresh new color palette, improved navigation, and a new main-navigation section for Performances. The redesign is refreshing, captivating, and truly evokes the forensics performance arts. Usability will improve further as navigating to various landing pages will become quick and easy. This will be the third relaunch of improving on ForCom's design and usability, and I personally cannot wait to show everyone our new face.
2) "EliteSpeak": We will be offering an exciting new service at ForCom called EliteSpeak. It will be a central hub with expert-level advice on every category across speech and debate. It is aimed for the serious forensics competitor looking to make significant improvements towards qualifying for Nationals and competing effectively at Nationals. Among other things, it will contain the following:
- Over 90 Expert Articles written by top-performing competitors on how to excel in each category.
- A Database of over 500 select piece recommendations across the major speech categories. These are individually hand-picked piece recommendations selected based on past performance.
- Video Interviews and Performances from top finishers at Nationals.
- Discussion Forums in order to receive your personal questions answered.
3) Performance Videos and Improved Tournament Pages: We will be expanding our video offerings and focusing on sharing videos of student performances. The theme will be a focus on peer reviews of performances - everyone within the community sharing thoughts on eachother's performances. Any user may upload any performance at any time in order to receive constructive feedback from members in the community. We have a treasure trove of knowledge and experience and we should share it amongst ourselves to improve one another. Judges don't always need to have the final word! :) Performances uploaded will then show up on each user profile and also the tournament page.
Our mission at ForCom has been to build out a world-class community for speech and debate competitors online. We have done this over the past season through offering helpful articles-videos on forensics, posting tournament-results from across the country for easy access, and offering robust social-networking features to connect forensics competitors across the country. We will continue to be posting tournament results from across the country this upcoming season as well as helpful articles and blogs to improve everyone's skills.
Stay tuned for some large developments over the coming weeks. ForCom 3.0 awaits. I hope you are as excited as I am.
Welcome back to school, and best wishes for a terrific season this year!
Best Regards,
Michael Sarill