Interview by: Jamin "
Skorpion" Colley
Spotlighted site: Hardwareluxx.com 
UBBDev: What is you background with computers, and how did you get started on the Web?
Hardwareluxx: Well I got my first PC when I was eleven, it was a Commodore Amiga 500, not an IBM-compatible and I just used it for gaming... and I wasn´t as crazy as I am today at that time with hardware. This started four years ago, when I was working in a shop here in Germany during my free time on university. Then I started reading daily IT-news, got to know more and more and finally also decided, that I have to get my own website. That was a personal one, not hardware related, so I just got around 100 visitors - a year ;-)
Hardwareluxx was started in December last year - so it is online just for seven month. After reading those german hardware webzines for three years, I thought I could do the same...
UBBDev: How did you brainstorm the idea behind Hardwareluxx.com?
Hardwareluxx: There are several great international sites - Anandtech.com, Tomshardware, Sharky Extreme and others, so I wanted to build a website, which is as critical, which offers daily news and really good reviews - those sites are present international, but in Germany, there are just a few sites who offer good hardware information. In the first days, I was also of the opinion, that content will sell - so I worked with a WYSIWYG html-editor and made the side out of frames... I had no idea of perl, php and others... this is basically the problem what I have now - the site is big now and there are around a thousand pages now - html is not possible any more, so I have to go over to php or perl.
UBBDev: They do seem to make administering large sites much easier! What was your reason for chosing UBB™ for your site?
Hardwareluxx: That´s easy : I was looking for something special. Every site has a forum - Ikonboard, Yabb or VBulletin - but just the really BIG international sites had UBB. I thought : "Ok, then let´s take UBB, it is a little bit expensive, but you´ll be the only hardware site in Germany with UBB." After I was working with UBB for a few weeks, I was really glad that I took it.
UBBDev: It's always great to have the one feature that sets you apart from the other sites. What do you like and dislike most about UBB™?
Hardwareluxx: What I like : The Control Panel, really useful and it makes it easy to set up the UBB. UBBDev, because there was A LOT OF HELP for me as newbie, sorry for all those questions, guys ;-)
What I don´t like : Well, I don´t really know. I didn´t find any advantage of other boards over UBB - perhaps UBB causes a little bit more traffic then others, but it is worth it because it looks much better. Anyway, this will be fixed in the next versions, so I don´t worry. Nothing I dislike !
UBBDev: Heh, that's always good to hear! What's your favorite restaurant?
Hardwareluxx: Pizza Hut. There are not many of those here in Germany, but I really like them. There are several italian and turkish restaurants here in Germany ("Döner" tastes very good - try it if you are here in Germany) which are also tasty, but I like pizza. When I am in the US, I am always looking for Taco Bell - best tacos everywhere ;-)
UBBDev: How do you keep your site "fresh" and keep your visitors coming back for more?
Hardwareluxx: Well, I try to do up to five short articles in our news every day, every week there is a longer review on our site with some new hardware - about up to 20 pages long, so the people get much to read. But at the moment, I think that 50% of our visitors come back daily to talk in our UBB - this nearly doubled the amount of visitors we have every day.
UBBDev: What's the one UBB™ mod that you like best? And the one your users like the best?
Hardwareluxx: That´s difficult - Who´s Online and Active Topics are the most favorite, but UBBNews was the one, which saved me a lot of time in the last weeks, so I think that UBBNews is my favorite, even if I installed many more hacks...
My users loved Easy´s Make-A-Game I think because they could win a soundcard with this hack - the Poll-hacks are also great, but I think Active Topics was mentioned as the most useful.
UBBDev: AMD or Intel?
Hardwareluxx: Good question
If you will look in my ubb, you will find many posts with this question - and answers like "AMD rruuuulzzz !" or "Intel sux" or something like that.
But it´s not that easy : At the moment you can buy AMD and a good platform with the best price/performance ratio and I think, this is the best solution for your home or office. But Intel doesn´t sleep, we´ll see fast and cheap Intel-CPUs in the next months, but be aware of the i845 SDRAM-Chipset for the Pentium IV - this one is really slow.
UBBDev: What's the one mod that you feel is an absolute necessity to any UBB™?
Hardwareluxx: Well, UBB is ok, even if you don´t modify it, you just have to make it fit to your site. But I think Who´s Online and other hacks which will appear on the startpage are very important to make it look as professional as it could be.
UBBDev: Professionality is always a good thing.
Are there any "tricks of the trade" you can share with us so other UBBers can benefit from your experience?
Hardwareluxx: Work hard on your site. It´s hard to get users, but if you keep working and answer their questions, you´ll get a nice little community. Try to connect your UBB with the content on your side - for example, if we write a review of a new motherboard, we also mention, that we´ll answer any further questions in our forums. Keep in touch with your visitors !
UBBDev: Nice method of site integration! What are your future plans for Hardwareluxx?
Hardwareluxx: We´ll launch some other sites in the next weeks which will also be implemented in our forums. Digitalluxx will contain latest infos on DVD, CD and events, Softwareluxx will offer information about new software and how-to-guides. Gamersluxx will be a kind of community for gamers with latest news of new games, patches, cheats etc. So there will be a lot of work...
For Hardwareluxx, I am planning something like this U-Zine - Allen did a great work with it - and this one will be perfect for our guides and articles. In this way, I can also end this html-crop ;-)
Let´s see where we are when a year is over - when I manage to get around 5000 unique IP´s a day until December, I think the first year was a very good one then.
Ok, finally something else : I was really shocked when Jamin told me, that Hardwareluxx.com won the Member Spotlight Contest. There are many great ubb´s out there and I think that Hardwareluxx is just one of them. I´ll keep on working making it more perfect, but we didn´t manage to win the prize alone - without the help of some persons : For example Easy, who told me that Dreamweaver will not be good for editing source code and who helped me with my first steps in UBB-hacking - Allen, qasic, and all those guys in the forum, who helped me with my stupid questions ;-) Thanks for your help !!!
UBBDev: We're all glad we can be of service! And we hope to see even more cool features on Hardwareluxx soon! Thanks for taking the time to do this interview with us!
:::
