ABOUT THIS WEBSITE...
Hello,
My name is Ron Thomas.. I would like to take a moment of your time to tell you about this website. It is about 4 years old and was created at the suggestion of the park manager, Larry Henson. He said it might be a nice thing for the residents of the park. I knew absolutely nothing about how to make such a thing but decided to give it a try. My daughter had taken a class in writing code for websites as she had to create one in her roll as public relations officer at a community college in California. With her help and with some text books she gave me, I began.
On the internet I found Blogger... Which would create a blog (known as a web log) for people that knew absolutely nothing about writing a web page and would do it for no money. For awhile it was enough to use their format and write local news and opinion. At that time we had about 6 readers. There were no pictures.. didn’t know how to do that. But my interest grew as I began to read other folks blogs... They had features that mine did not have.
How did they do that? A time of reading and experimenting with code came over me. There were a whole bunch of people on the internet who had, “how to do this and that for your website”. We devoured all that we could understand and went to books for help on what we could not. The blog grew both in size and readership. Maybe 30 people a day.. It grew difficult to write about things around the park. I was starving for news. About this time we learned how to put pictures on the site. For $40 a year I could use a service that would let me upload up to 100 pictures. My old Kodak and I roamed the park in search of stuff. Eventually pictures from all over Oregon started to show up on the site.
During these months we could not get many people to write on the website. So it was all the Ron Thomas show. Occasionally, Cleda or Donna Talarski would write something but mostly I just had to find something to put in every day.
Years later we now have 3 writing people and all know how to put pictures on the website. They have found it incredibly easy to do this .. Ask Charles or Donna what a snap it is. But before they came on I was starved for time and stuff to put on the site. I began borrowing from news sites. Finding articles to fill in the long blank spots when we had nothing to say. Suddenly our readership became national and even international readership here in Newport went sky rocketing. Today it is not uncommon to have a 300 person a day audience.
However, all this attention has focused on a point that I could use your help in showing what this website could do.. It may now be yet another time for change. We are sensitive to what we hear from our readers.. Mostly they talk to us in the clubhouse, at the computer classes, in emails and at neighborly get togethers. Lately, people are commenting on how terrific the pictures Charles is providing are.. Comments are something like a picture is worth a thousand words. Donna’s stories on animals provide human interest and new a community service to Newport. She also has some pretty good stuff on natural remedies. But there is a bunch of veiled (nicely put comments) about there being too much Non-local news and sports.
Others have commented on how fast the local news migrates off the page.. Often not giving local readers a chance to see it. These are all problems that I have remedies for. The solutions might be interesting to you.
I am thinking of keeping the main website for local news with some humor and maybe an occasional article that impacts Oregonites. Maybe medical news and discoveries with any breaking news to do with elderly benefits.
And then we will create spin off websites where state, national and international news of the day can go. We already have a humor site which Charles keeps up on a regular basis and a Fisherman’s site which is dedicated to the largest of LVH club’s. Again, this is largely Charles’ effort.
Donna suggested a poll about these subjects. So now you have a chance in the most recent poll to voice a very safe, anonymous, opinion on the left side of the page and help the staff in directing the website to your liking. Please take a moment to vote.
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