Here are a few topics to introduce you to the way that the Weather-Watching Community site works:

The left hand menu has the following options on it. You can see what each icon means by hovering over it or by clicking the red block in the top left hand corner to expand the menu.

* Members Newsfeed – This takes you to a page with a list of public things which have happened on the site (most recent first). So you will find new member registrations, blog posts, etc here.
* Activity – This is a page which shows you what you’ve done (most recent first).
* Members – A page listing Community members. The default page shows recently active members. There’s a menu option on the page to show other sets of members. For example, if you select ‘Alphabetical’ then you get a complete list of all members.
* Groups – A page listing all groups in the Community. A group is a segregated list of posts, images, etc. Some groups are public, which means you can join them if you like. Others will be private, i.e. you have to request membership. Others may be secret, in which case you’ll never know they exist! You only see group content for groups that you’re a member of, so it’s a good way to limit how much content you see by only joining groups that are of interest to you. You can also create your own group for special interests if there isn’t one that’s already been created.
* Media – A page showing image, video and related files. I still need to investigate this further myself, because I don’t yet know how this content gets created!
* Events – A page of calendar related events. I’m not sure if this will get much use, but perhaps it might be useful for some predictable things, e.g. launch dates for new hardware, weather related webinar events and maybe even some anniversary dates for previous memorable weather events.
* Forum – There is forum functionality built into the Community software but I’m not sure if/how we’d use it yet. Something more to explore
* Blog Grid – This has a number of different ways to display the Community Blog. At the moment I think I’m the only one who can make Blog posts, but maybe that’s good. That would mean that other posts need to go into your own activity or groups. So there’s not a huge volume of posts that are fired at you – you only see content in groups that you’ve joined or people you’re friends with.

The last three icons are just links to the Weather-Watch Forum, Wiki and Gallery that have been with us for years.