The 4degreez.com Media Kit This page contains concise information about 4degreez.com. It is meant to give you, the visitor, an informative overview of what 4degreez.com offers and what it is about. Please read through the information presented on this page and if you have any further questions, feel free to contact the webmaster. 4degreez.com's Mission The 4degreez.com mission is simple: to provide a friendly, entertaining environment for young people to interact. Founded in January '99, this site has grown to include a variety of fun features, including message boards, poetry, jokes, and more. These features and others are described further down on this page. 4degreez.com was designed with one thing in mind: the visitor. Many sites become overly focused on ad revenue. If you look around this website, you will notice a refreshing lack of what I call "ad overkill." Instead, great care has been taken to provide the visitor with a wide range of options, navigation tools, and of course entertainment. As webmaster, I continually listen to comments and suggestions, and try to improve this site in meaningful ways. We now receive nearly 30,000 unique visitors per month and have an active registered membership of over 6,000. 4degreez.com serves 2 million advertisements per month. And we are growing larger by the day! The 4degreez.com Member's Area The central focus of this website is the members area. Of course, membership at 4degreez.com is unconditionally free. Below is a screen shot of the 4degreez.com Member's Area: A) This is the navigation frame. Here, members have a list of the main sections of 4degreez.com. Whenever a new section is added, it's link is added here. When the link is clicked, the member is taken to that section, and the navigation frame is changed to display links pertinent to that section. At any time, a member can jump back to the main navigation frame. B) This is the member's icon. All members can choose icons to represent themselves. 4degreez.com offers hundreds to select from. C) Here are links for members to change their icon and to edit their profile. All members get a profile that describe themselves and their interests. Below those two links is the member's status. Member's status is described further down this page. D) This lists how many members are currently signed in. There is a link to a page which displays a list of all members signed in along with other information, such as what section of 4degreez.com they currently are in. E) In this box is the most recently submitted member's joke. 4degreez.com can submit jokes to the jokes section, and the most recent one is displayed on this main page. F) Tips on how to enhance the 4degreez.com experience are displayed here. G) This frame reloads about once every minute and displays one of the following: a "random thought-provoking quotation," a link to the most recently made message board post (MRP), or an advertising banner. Members would be unhappy if banner after banner were rotated through, however they enjoy the quotations and the new MRP feature. H) This frame contains more options for members. Its most important feature is to notify members of new private messages. Private messages are messages sent from one member to another. This frame checks every 90 seconds for new messages. I) Finally, this section lists messages to the members when they sign in. The latest features are linked here as well. The 4degreez.com Message Boards The most popular feature here at 4degreez.com is the set of message boards. A wide range of interesting topics are represented on the boards. Members meet and discuss religion on the religion board, philosophy on the philosophy board, music on the music board, and so on. Below is an example of a posted message on the 4degreez.com Comments/Updates Board: As you can see, the title of the post appears at the top, along with the options to return to the board's index or post a new message. Below that is the member's name, along with his icon and a link to private message him. Clicking on the icon or name will cause his profile to pop up. Then, there is the message itself, which can be any length and include HTML tags. 4degreez.com also has a set of smileys that can be put anywhere in the message with simple codes. Seen in this post is a happy face smiley. Below the message is a thread navigation tool. The 4degreez.com message boards are threaded in exactly the same way as traditional wwwboard-style message boards. The thread navigation tool puts a blue dot next to the post that is currently being viewed, and displays links to all the other posts in that thread. Finally, at the bottom of each post is a form to reply to the post. This form includes several options, including title, no text, optional link to an outside page, formatting for smileys, and post preview, which displays for the member what their post will look like so they can make changes before committing. A box for their name is not necessary, because the boards "know" the members' names automatically. This message board system, called Chat Board v1.032, was written by me, the webmaster, specifically for 4degreez.com. Jokes, Quotations, Poetry, and More 4degreez.com has an ever-growing assortment of entertainment sections. Each are briefly described below: Jokes The jokes section contains story-style jokes divided up into categories. Each joke can be rated for quality and e-mailed to a friend. The top ten highest rated jokes are listed on their own page. Within each joke category, the jokes can be sorted by rating or date they were added. Members can submit new jokes at any time. Quotations 4degreez.com boasts a database of well over 1,000 quotations. They are broken down into categories such as wisdom, inspiration, and humor. The database is searchable by keywords or by author. Each quotation has a star rating for quality, and like the jokes, they can be sorted by rating, date added, and by author's name. Poetry A new feature at 4degreez.com, the poetry section houses poetry written by members. Each member is actually given free space to host their poetry. Software selects a poem of the day as well as the day's three featured poets. Personality Disorders It may sound strange, but we have a section on these psychological disorders, including personality disorder forums Baby Information Blog We've got a blog maintained by a first-time dad, chock full of baby information and shared experiences. Prospective and current parents may be interested. E-mail 4degreez.com provides a top-notch free web-based e-mail service. Members and non-members alike can choose any @4degreez.com address they want. Account size is 4MB- higher than most free e-mail services. Reviews There are four different reviews sections: music, movies, books, and video games. At the moment, this section is scheduled for major renovation. New features will be added to it, such as a search ability and a reviews archive. Miscellaneous 4degreez.com has a growing collection of miscellaneous odds and ends. These include the mysterious advice bunny who dispenses advice magic 8-ball style, various polls along with members' comments, a personality disorder test, and more. Many new miscellaneous scripts are planned for the future. Future of 4degreez.com 4degreez.com will continue to grow, as it has been, in members and in features. Plans for the future include channels for specific interests such as web design or anime, clubs created and run by members, member-created message boards, increased functionality of the existing java chat, and many miscellaneous interactive additions to add to the fun of visiting 4degreez.com. In order to help fund the growth, 4degreez.com will soon implement a system to sell ad space to advertisers. I intend to set CPM rates at highly competitive prices. Advertisers marketing to young people will want to bookmark this site and check back when the ad system is in place. A strong selling point will be 4degreez.com's commitment to fight ad overkill. 4degreez.com visitors will not be flooded with advertisements, as is the norm on numerous other sites, thus making our ad space more valuable. Critical Acclaim Despite being such a young site, 4degreez.com has already begun receiving critical acclaim. We've been rated highly by Go.com, HotBot, About.com, and Coffeerooms.com. 4degreez.com has also been featured in Teen People, Web Bound, and Playboy magazines. Technical Information 4degreez.com is run on Mivascript. Beneath the surface is a system of scripts and databases that combine to create the 4degreez.com experience. I am proud to say that currently, every script running this site has been personally written by me. When future growth demands it, I will hire others to aid in scripting. Contact Information If you have any questions or comments, the best way to get in touch with me is to use the e-mail address four_degreez@yahoo.com, as it is the one I check most frequently. If you have a membership at this site, I can also be contacted by posting on the Comments/Updates Board. Thank you for your time! Enjoy the site! =) Latest News I have been working on new sites these days, including the quotation site Well of Wisdom and the Christian inspirational site Christian-Wisdom.com, as well as version 2.0 of 4degreez, 4thKingdom.com. Be sure to check them out!