02
Dec
05

Worked Skateboard Magazine and Online Publishing

Sure, there’s nothing new about an online magazine, they’re all over the place. But I’ll bet you probably haven’t seen one like Worked Magazine.

Leave it to skaters to think “Well, what if the online magazine actually looked and worked like a real magazine?”

Go to http://www.workedmagazine.com/, and then click on the right where it says “Click here to launch”.


It takes a while to load, but once you see what’s inside you’ll be impressed it loaded that fast.

There are a few things I like about this format:

1. It’s unique.

2. It’s user friendly. If you know how to use a magazine, you can easily use this website. And somehow it doesn’t seem annoying, because you expect it to work like a magazine, and it does.

There are a few things I don’t like about it:

1. Search engine invisible.

2. Lacks some of the features of a typical online magazine.

3. You can’t send a link of a certain article or page to your friend.

But you know what? I don’t care. I still enjoy reading the thing. In addition to the magazine being unique and user-friendly, the publishers have done some other things well:

1. Great design. The thing is nice to look at.

2. The ads are well designed. The skateboarding industry has been ahead of the rest of the advertising world for a long time, in that 90% of the ads in a skateboarding magazine from 1985 were interesting to look at. You actually want to look at the ads. What a concept. Of course if you’re not a skateboarder you probably wouldn’t, but then you wouldn’t be their target market in the first place, right?

I just hope they can keep it up. They appear to have the advertisers, but I just hope they can get the traffic to the site that will justify what the advertisers are paying.

  • Mwinn

    I’ve seen this format/method used for a lot of low brow art magazines for a while but it really hasn’t caught on much. I did mess around with an application that came with my Mac where you could download major publications and view them in a similar manner.

    I’m surprised none of the major skate pubs (TWS, Skatemag, Skateboarder (but not thrasher/slap)) haven’t experimented with alternative formats to reach more of their nomadic readers. Mobile media would cater to us nicely, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a surge in both skate and snow (imagine watching videos while you’re riding up the lift or to the spot on your phone or Ipod).

  • http://www.workedmagazine.com Matt Ramage

    Thanks for the input man. Im always stoked on constructive critisism and were always working to improve the magazine. By next months issue we should have an active table of contents to jump to specific sections of the mag as well as some of the features you mentioned above complete. I just wanted to say thanks for the support and we are always down to hear how we can make the mag better.

    Thanks again,
    Matt