If you have been to a our Pre-Tuning Checklist, you know that its a pretty hefty list of things to check over. In our effort to clean up the site and make it easier to schedule a tuning appointment, we have noticed that the tuning checklist(s) are somewhat difficult to get through in one session. So in the coming week I will be starting a clean-up of the Evans Tuning Pre-Tuning Checklist.

It should be noted that everything on the list not only needs to be checked but it is all actually very important. This is the main reason for cleaning it up. Seeing as how going over the checklist is one of the biggest steps to ensuring a successful tuning appointment, it should be a relatively painless process.

Jeff, Andrea, and I have been critiquing every portion of the site trying to get it down to the bare essentials where needed and add the critical information where its missing. If you have seen something lately that just doesn’t sit right, please leave a comment and let us know. Otherwise, I will keep you posted on the updates as I start rolling them out in a few days (if all goes well).

Found an interesting read today on RoadandTrack.com, about Honda’s coming S2K successor. It hasn’t actually been named the Honda S3000 which derives from the possibility of a 3.0L+ engine spec. Not quite sure that what we are looking at here is something that I could see coming out of the Honda factory anytime soon. This mock-up looks a bit too much like newer Audi designs for me to really be interested personally but I suppose thats just one person’s opinion.

I’m interested. What are your thoughts on the S3000 concept pictured above? Would you buy it? Does a 3.0L+ engine make sense for this chassis?

Here’s the deal, because I am sure by now you have seen some of the ads on the forum like this one for the blog.

Our stats show that most of our visitors use our forums more than anything else. So we have decided rather than continuing to update you all with the front page of our site (though that effort continues for individuals who do not use our forums of course), we are going to bring critical updates straight to you on the forum.

These ads will become forum specific as time goes on. For example, if you are browsing the S2K forum expect information regarding sales, and other information that is S2K related.

I have already received inquiries to advertise on our forum earlier today, and unfortunately we are only using these adspaces as informational only regarding specials, and events at Evans Tuning.

Hopefully you all find these info ads helpful and they help direct your attention to things that you may be interested in but didn’t realize were offered or happening around here.

Well I figured I would just do a quick entry on the Evans Tuning YouTube Channel. If you haven’t been there I suggest you check it out, subscribe, add us as a friend, or whatever you like to do on YouTube.

So far we have 3 great walkthroughs up and are planning to add more (especially with winter coming up). We have a lot of great ideas for new videos but would like the your input as well on what you would like to see shown on video. I can’t make any promises that things like “how to tune a car” will happen (sorry folks) but I am sure just about anything else that enough people want to learn how to do on their own will be heavily considered.

Make sure to leave some comments here, and on our videos.

iPhone / iPod owners have a way of getting information on their car that everyone else needs to go to the track for, kinda… Its actually relatively cheaper than going to the track, as a matter of fact you can get a burger and fries at Englishtown for the cost of this app (at least since I have last been there).

Its called Dynolicious and its made for iPhone and iPod Touch. It touts the use of the devices built-in accelerometer to track things like:

• 0-60 Acceleration
• 1/4 Mile Elapsed Time
• Lateral G’s
• Horsepower

Dynolicious is available for purchase in the iTunes App Store for $12.99.

I have a friend who has played around in his Audi with the app and says it really seems relatively accurate. Maybe we can get some 3rd party opinions on it. Tell me what you think about it.

This post is going to sum it all up. Please read this one with good humor in mind, I am not out to offend anyone. So here we go, why the office staff can’t answer technical questions…

Background (what goes on in the office):

There’s a funny trend on our website that is just plain obvious if you have visited the contact page at all lately. Jeff and Andrea insisted on writing the same thing over and over again on that page about tech questions not being answered in the office and I could never really get what all the stress was about til now. By the way the contact page needs some housecleaning I hope you will agree, and I am working on that.

The thing is, our office like many others has days (more often than not) when there is literally no time to utter a thought about simple things, like whats for lunch. The bad news for us is that the phone rings non-stop and since there is only one person in the office to take calls it can become quite an undertaking.

Then there are days (although few and relatively far between) where the action around here is less than interesting to say the least.

So why can’t we answer tech questions over the phone?

Sadly, the answer doesn’t even relate to the fact that we either have time or don’t have time to be on the phone. The real answer as to why we can’t answer these questions is so much simpler, and that is because we don’t really have the answers.

Some of you might be thinking right now, well I have gotten answers before by calling, and that may very well be true. The reason for this in the past has been because we (Andrea and I) will go and find answers on the site when they are asked and we know they are there.

The conclusion to the issue plaguing the masses

I hope that this post clears it all up. Jeff really knows a lot of good info, and most of it is on the site. Now I above all understand that there are questions which just don’t have answers to them on the site (I am working on getting them all documented don’t you worry). The short and sweet of it all is that Jeff answers emails quite often considering the amount that he gets on a daily basis. He does tech support for products we sell here, he does tuning support for customers who have been tuned here, and he answers mostly all questions and threads posted on our forums.

So I encourage you all to take advantage of having a direct line to him at tech@evans-tuning.com and access to all of the awesome contributors on our forums @ http://forums.evans-tuning.com

So I thought it might be fun to take a look back at where evans-tuning.com came from. At first I failed to remember and I began laughing at the old websites back in the boosted-hybrid.com days, later coming to the shocking realization that the web design may have changed since then but not the web designer.

Unfortunately, some of these shots are really nothing to be proud of, but when you’ve moved along I guess it doesn’t hurt to look back and laugh. So lets start from the beginning.

The first Evans-Tuning website (boosted-hybrid.com) - October 2003

How many of you were actually around back then? Although the intentions were good, I am not sure we carried it out so well. By the way the classifieds section, that was our version of an online store (not thrilling to say the least).

Version 2 of the Evans-Tuning website (boosted-hybrid.com) - December 2003

So we decided to abandon the idea of a “website” for a bit and moved to just a discussion board. This is when Evans Tuning really started to take off.  We grew relatively quickly as Jeff was posting non-stop some of the most useful information online (and he still does). Pretty funny just thinking we got away with the whole Crimson Ghost / Turbo Fiend Club idea for so long. We still have all the forums we started with and quite a few more.

Version 3 of the Evans-Tuning website (boosted-hybrid.com / evans-tuning.com) - January 2005

So we got our first logo in January of 2005, what a nice looking bloody turbo it was. To be honest we weren’t in the market to impress anyone, and we did that quite nicely. We also added the Troubleshooting / Media / and Non-Tech forums to the board and changed the title to reflect our new website address and business name Evans Tuning.

Version 4 of the Evans-Tuning website (evans-tuning.com) - December 2006

So we stepped it up and got a real website and the look lasted for quite a while. This was the look we would retain until we got to our current look. Notice we got ourselves a catalog, a calendar, the tuning checklist, and a tech article section all going down the random side area’s of the site.  Needless to say this was a navigation nightmare in which it was pretty impossible to find anything unless you knew where it was already or had 20 minutes to hangout and look around.

Version 4 of the Evans-Tuning website (evans-tuning.com) - October 2007

Oh I remember this quite well, partially because it wasn’t very long ago. We announced our new site was coming in October of 2007. Jeff and Andrea leave on their honeymoon and I get to work on the new site. This was hilarious because I could have sworn that I heard from them more often when they were on their honeymoon than ever before. So it was time to move away from a lot of what we had been doing since 2003, basically all the darkness needed to go.

Version 5 of the Evans-Tuning website (evans-tuning.com) - Late October 2007 - Present

Hey look at that a clean easy navigation, light gray, and white? What company is this website for? A lot less text a lot more pictures, a lot easier to understand. This site is really just a stepping stone to what is to come in the future.  The simpler the better, and we plan to make it extremely simple!!

So there you have it folks. The online transformation of boosted-hybrid.com to evans-tuning.com. Hopefully you enjoyed reading. Leave some comments and let me know what you think about the old “boosted-hybrid” compared to the new evans tuning. Also I want to know what you think we need to add to our site if anything.

Thanks for stopping to have a look at our first post here. I wanted to start with somewhat of an informational approach to cover the last few developments I have made on the site. We have had an initiative around the office to make this site easier to navigate and to make information more readily available to you our users. So on to whats happening…

Evans Tuning forum:

If you haven’t checked out the newly redesigned Forum I really suggest having a look at it, its a great source of information and now it looks better than ever.  There is a link to it in the links section of this blog, you can click on it here and as always its the third link down on our main navigation menu.

Tuning Page:

A ‘Tuning’ page was recently added and is getting a fresh new look in a few days, which I will update you on. Our intent is to provide you with just a few simple steps to understanding what is involved in a tuning appointment and how to be ready when you call the office to schedule it.

Get your Engine built by Evans Tuning:

Our latest update is our new engines page. We are offering 3 awesome packages to have your engine built at what we think, and hope you agree are some of the best prices in the industry. There were such huge responses to our engine build tech video we have decided it best to offer these services.

I hope you all subscribe and find this blog useful, I will continue to post here, and hopefully Jeff and Andrea will join me in doing so.  Write some encouraging comments to get them posting!