Merging of the Universes

FROM AMARILLO DESIGN BUREAU, INC. 31 JULY 2007

PRESS RELEASE: STAR FLEET UNIVERSE AND
FEDERATION COMMANDER WEBSITES MERGE

Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc., is pleased to announce the completion of its project to merge its two websites. The new one (www.FederationCommander.com) is now an integral part of the original site (www.StarFleetGames.com). All of the content of FederationCommander.com is now part of StarFleetGames.com so nothing was lost.

We originally created a separate website for our newest product line out of concern that the complex StarFleetGames.com website would confuse the new customers playing Federation Commander. However, our increasing web savvy (in the person of Matthew Cooper, our in-house webmaster) improved StarFleetGames.com to the point that it was no longer confusing to anyone. (The new index lists everything on the site with easy-to-follow links.)

While the cost of maintaining two websites was a factor, our primary motivation was one of increasing customer service by eliminating customer confusion. What was confusing people was that we had two sites that, increasingly, duplicated each other. Most of FederationCommander.com had become part of the improved StarFleetGames.com, and players of Federation Commander were increasingly seeking information about our other product lines (driving us to include more and more data about those other products on that site).

The new combined site uses the original url (www.StarFleetGames.com) but (after the DNS entry propagates) the FederationCommander.com url will just go to the StarFleetGames.com/federation and you won't even notice.

All of the services and features of both sites remain, although some have been merged. StarBlog remains in service, replacing the Hot News Blog that repeated the same information. Hailing Frequencies, the opt-in newsletter, remains in operation and subscribing to it is easier. The non-identical pages for certain product lines have been combined into unified and complete pages. It was always confusing that the Commander's Circle was not on the Federation Commander website; this is no longer a problem. The two shopping carts had become nearly identical, but the few non-identical items were confusing everybody. The one shopping cart (https://www169.safesecureweb.com/starfleetstore/merchant2/merchant.mvc) has everything you need, without the confusion.

We ask customers to bear with us as the transition period plays out. There are literally hundreds of links on the various pages of the site, and converting those that went to various parts of FederationCommander.com to go to the analog spots on StarFleetGames.com cannot have been a perfect process. If you find a broken link, or one that goes to an unexpected place, please let us know. Our staff continues to review every link on www.StarFleetGames.com in rotation to verify links and update them with new information, but knowing that a particular link is going haywire will allow us to fix it immediately.

We welcome feedback on the merged website. Contact us at graphics@StarFleetGames.com with your comments and any suggestions for improvement. We want to thank Spellmann and Associates for hosting (and the initial design of) FederationCommander.com and helping us move into a new era of our web presence.