Supatrax is an on-line magazine created and co-ordinated by myself. Supatrax started off as a college project as a module for my HND in Graphic Design. Within weeks hundreds of daily visitors were on the site and the magazine started to grow in strength.

Supatrax provided a platform for young BME Black people to go on-line and read popular topics presented and written in a style they could relate to. Established in 2001, long before MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Twitter, Supatrax was the original urban social networking website. Supatrax is now one of the UK’s leading Urban websites. It paved the way for many artists, magazines and internet based urban companies in the UK (and worldwide) throughout the years.

Supatrax’s official launch party was September 2001 after a 6 month testing period. Supatrax has since grown from strength to strength growing in popularity on a weekly, monthly and annual basis.

Supatrax is now a major player in expressing the opinions and acting as the voice for urban communities across Birmingham and the UK. Supatrax is always at the cutting edge of innovative communication with the inner city communities and was one of the first companies catering for a urban audience on the world wide web. It has a good strong following of regular browsers as well as people that know the name and brand – but are too scared of modern technology. It reaches audiences on the net and via community links and street promotion.

Supatrax has a team of young people working on a voluntary basis to gain vital work experience. I have mentored previous team members to go on to university becoming qualified as a Doctor, Graphic Designer, Illustrator, and a person gained a job as a project manager. Some have become self employed. Some have been able to use the experience from Supatrax to gain further paid employment. Supatrax is also an outlet for young people to get involved and further their career

Via Supatrax I have provided community workshops aimed at engaging young people and the hard to reach audience. Me and the team have successfully co-ordinated a number of workshops based on Graphic Design, Music and Multimedia. This has proven to be a very powerful way of engaging young people and is very effective.

Within the first week of Supatrax being on line there were 250 members registered, this exploded into a database of thousands of email, text contacts and postal addresses. Supatrax also has an on-line social networking campaign via Facebook networks, Twitter sites and a MySpace account.

Supatrax had some negative national publicity in 2005 following a message that had been posted on the website, regarding the Birmingham riots. Since then the popularity of the site has grown and the Birmingham inner city community has really shown support for the site.

Supatrax is a self funded project.

Supatrax is funded via personal investment, site advertisements and promotional events that I co-ordinate. It is a not for profit making organistaion. All monies generated via the site, help maintain the site, raise the site profile or support community projects, team members and events.