stuff about autopendium

One of the joys of restoring an old car, even if you’re doing it slowly (perhaps especially if), is the incremental nature of it. Rarely do we have all the bits we need to start and finish a job on the same day, and things have a habit of taking longer than you at first think.

So it is with the Autopendium Classic Car Resources Directory. We were always going to add museums and other places to the Clubs, Websites, Books and Suppliers Directories — just took us a little longer than planned. Well, it’s done now, and the Autopendium Classic Car Museum Directory is now live, and already has nearly 150 entries, ranging from the small Cotswold Motor Museum & Toy Collection to the huge Petersen Museum in LA, as well as some great specialist ones such as the Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum.

You can filter by country, so can see just the classic car museums in the UK, for example, or car museums in  Germany. We’ve also got sections for race tracks and historical locations, so if you know of any good ones, please do add them. Similarly, if we’ve forgotten any of your favourite museums.

Finally, we’ve tied all this in to Google Maps, so with one click of the mouse you can see the location on a map easy as you like:

Example of Classic Car Museum Directory entry

Despite the lack of posts on the this blog, we’ve been far from inactive on Autopendium :: stuff about old cars these past few months. There’s been loads of new features, tweaks, bugfixes and back-end improvements, all designed to make Autopendium the best classic car resource possible. I’ll be doing a series of catch-up posts, over the next few weeks to bring everyone up to speed.

First off, since the beginning of this year, we’ve been giving the site a bit of a design refresh. What does that mean? Well if you’ve not visited the site for a while, it’ll perhaps look slightly different to how you remembered it (but only slightly); if you’re a regular visitor now and then you may have noticed a few changes to colours, typefaces and positioning over the past few months; and if you’re a new visitor the site’s even easier to use.

What’s changed? Well, let’s look at the heart of Autopendium, the pages for classic car models and marques. This was what they used to look like:

Classic car model or marque information page

And this is what they look like now:

New look for classic car model information and resources

As you can see, we’ve been able to get a lot more information there, and hopefully you’ll agree that it’s all rather more concise and easy to use.

We’ve also updated the vehicle page from:

Information and resources for member's vehicle

to this, meaning when you go to your vehicle’s page, all the info you want is right where you need it:

New classic car vehicle information page

Along the way, we’ve also improve the look of the Autopendium Classic Car Events Directory, the Classic Car Resources Pages, and the front page.

The design work is, of course, a work in progress — it’s often better to make a series of incremental improvements than try and get everything perfect first time — so do let us know what you think. Comment, or send me a message through the site.