Tartan Tarmac was the brainchild of a handful of friends who wanted to create an open and friendly, cross-marque, cross-sector online community to enjoy the motoring and motor-sport scene in Scotland.
Two years on, it has been a great success, with a vibrant forum, regular features, videos, a busy Facebook feed and an incredibly friendly social aspect bringing together a truly broad church of motoring interests at our various events.
Success does bring its own problems however, and our baby has clearly become more than a hobby, so we are stepping up to meet the challenge of continuing to grow Tartan Tarmac while keeping a clear focus on what has made it work so well thus far.
We have taken a few key steps towards becoming all grown up and serious, such as creating a proper legal entity, writing an agreement with weird things like rules in it, and reviewing our liability insurance in case someone is injured by hail stones during the great weather that our breakfast meets often seem to attract.
All of this brings some cost, so we have looked into ways of bringing in a few sheckles without asking our readers to pay for the things they have come to expect without charge.
We will soon be promoting our range of merchandise, for those of your crazy enough to actually want to publicise your affiliation to our wee world. You may have seen some early examples of our wares at the events. There will be T-shirts, polo-shirts, jackets, mugs and of course the must have car accessory, the Tartan Tarmac sticker.
If you are interested in any merchandise, keep an eye open for our shop announcement, but if the sheer excitement of proudly showing your allegiance to our clan is too much to bear, then please do feel free to email us at shop@tartantarmac.com and we shall be happy to relieve you of some of your cash.
The first step you may notice as you use the TT website and forum, will be our Commercial Partner Programme. Starting next week, we will be joining forces with selected commercial partners in the form of some banner advertising, competitions, visible presence at events and so on. We will make sure that our site does not become one of those that is so full of advertising content that it becomes slow to load and we will remain pop-up free.
Part of the deal with our commercial partners will be a condition that they must provide a benefit to the Tartan Tarmac readers in the form of a discount or exclusive offers, so keep an eye for our partner announcements as there should be deals to be had.
Lastly, we hope to be providing more events for our readers to enjoy. We have lots of ideas and are working hard to get venues and providers lined up, so again, watch this space.
Meanwhile, life at TT goes on ever upwards with more and more content coming your way (some of it may even be more exciting than our recent M74 Average Speed Camera post).
Cheers
The Tartan Tarmac Team
