Since its creation in May, during BCM112, North Gong Daily has reached 1,857 views, with Referrers from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Search Engines, and has gone through multiple iterations.

However, since the Prototyping Stage of North Gong Daily, very little has changed, but I have spoken to Kel and Michelle regarding the future of NGD, and come up with a few ideas, for both my DA (the website) and their part – the Instagram and Facebook pages.

Kel, Michelle and Myself spoke about 4 potential ideas for North Gong Daily, which are:

1. A SurfCam
2. Advertisements
3. Updated Merchandise
4. Dropshipping

The North Gong Daily SurfCam

Kel and Michelle spoke to me recently about the idea of installing a Surf Cam at North Wollongong Surf Club, similar to the Cams used CoastalWatch. This will provide Surfers with 24/7 coverage of North Gong Beach, and letting NGD expand its services. To do this, NGD will need explicit permission from North Gong Surf Club as well as Wollongong City Council to install the Camera on the Club Building. After this is implemented Kel and Michelle will continue to make their daily reports, but also have the Camera for when they aren’t there.

Advertisements

From the 29th of September to the 7th of October, NGD also trialled having advertisements at the end and in the middle of each post. Kel and Michelle are friends with the people at Quadrant Financial Solutions, so they partnered with them during this time.

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After this, Kel approached me about potentially having Quadrant’s advertisements on the site, in return for sponsorship and financial payments. This would help decrease the costs of produce Shirts and Hoodies, paying for the potential SurfCam, and paying for the WordPress Premium Plan, with the potential to upgrade depending on the amount.

Updated Merchandise

I also spoke to Kel and Michelle regarding the merchandise available for NGD, and they informed me that they plan on offering more styles for the T-Shirts and Hoodies as well as different merchandise. I have suggested they add northgongdaily.com next to the Instagram and Facebook symbols, to get more views for the site by promoting it more.

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Dropshipping

I also spoke to them about implementing an online store onto the site, so users don’t have to message NGD about purchasing merchandise, and they were open to the idea. In order to do this, I would need to implement “Dropshipping”, a supply chain management method, where a business doesn’t keep stock itself, and instead passes on the sales order to a third-party supplier, who then ships the order to the customer. This can be done via certain plugins such as WooCommerce, which I discovered thanks to a Reddit Post on the WordPress Subreddit that I posted on in BCM206.

The future of North Gong Daily holds many different possibilities, and I expect it to continue to grow.