User Area & User Profile

Hi All,

I'm building a site that sells new & vintage motor scooter parts. The customers of this site a quite passionate about their scooters. I'm looking to create an area on the site that will be a fun place for users to visit.

Basically, I'm trying to create interest so that customers have a reason to come back. I'm sure some of you have done something like this or at least have some ideas about this concept. Please post any thoughts or pointers.

We would like to set up a user profile in which a user can enter all sorts of info - mostly about their scooters. I will try to capture some of this info from the registration screen, but also provide a form for data entry. I'm not sure if this info belongs on the customer record with a whole bunch of custom fields or if I should simply create a custom record for this data. Any opinions on this would be helpful.