You've gotta love spring!

Here it is the end of April and we're seeing snow on the ground! Some groundhog really had it in for us back in February..........

On the website front, we continue to work on some training with staff as well as work with some of the content to see how to input and how it presents. It is starting to come together nicely.

Just wanted to point out that we're making changes to database descriptions. On the teensite, Melissa has rewritten them to be more teen-friendly. Take a look and let us know what you think. On the mainsite, most of the editing has been done ~ trying to be more succinct yet convey the information needed. Your input is much appreciated!

Making Progress!

While the earth soaked up the moisture from last week's storm and the drivers slogged home slowly, if you looked far enough over the horizon you could tell spring was sitting there waiting to make its debut....and sure enough the snow turned to rain and the rain melted lots of the snow. There was actually green grass in the back yard yesterday!

This is what website work is feeling like these days. Not the storm part but the looking over the horizon part to see a glimmer of a website at the end of the keyboarding blood, sweat and tears.

Here's a laundry list of things we continue to work on and develop:

*creating content around the Research and Business pages
*finalizing the functions in the Programs & Classes pages
*describing how the transaction works when you click on "reserve now" - who would have thought such a simple click would involve hours of conversation?

At this point we will actually start training staff on some of the preliminary back end work - this is concrete and a sure sign of growth and progress!

In the meantime, let me make a shameless plug for the ALD Twitter - come visit - come follow!

the new keeping up with the joneses

my new theory is that keeping up with the joneses now involves technology and whom is besting whom with the latest gizmos out there to keep up with our lives! added to that are all of these social tools and interactive websites which draw us into their world of adding content, posting videos and messing with the latest apps which might be applicable to our world.

does this sound like a rant? that has a negative connotation and i don't mean for this blog post to come off that way. i, too, have been embracing the technology world. for instance, i spent a better part of yesterday curled up with my ....laptop. ten years ago i would have been spending the day on the couch with a book! not to say that reading is going by the wayside but with so much technology and smaller and more mobile tools out there, who's to say i can't curl up on the couch with my laptop reading the latest Grisham?

i recently put a book in my "to read" pile - virtually on goodreads.com. this has become a so much more convenient way to remember titles than using paper or sticky notes. one title came to me via a friend who found the title via a twitter feed. how's that for being really plugged in! it brings to mind a couple of things a) i need to become more twitter educated and 2) the realization that most of my day is spent in 140 character soundbites or attention span. i recently cleaned my desk and placed a bunch of professional reading in a pile. once you put all of this material together do you realize how far behind you are! on the other hand, it brings to mind that some reading takes time to absorb.

moving on from this train of thought let's see how easily it segues into website development...bumpy, eh? we continue our work with different aspects of the coding/backend work. i'm happy to report that the carousels are almost complete and we continue to educate ourselves about building canned searches from the books, movies and music pages. once we have some more pages built we will be able to load some of the text-heavy content so that we can really begin to see how the website comes together.

so, are there tools or websites that you just can't live without today, regardless of keeping up with.....everybody?

Can we celebrate spring yet?

The flowers in my yard are just so confused!  It's so sunny and warm they decide to bloom so I am welcomed home with yellow daffodils and tulips beckoning me to pay attention to them.  They've since succumbed to the re-awakening of winter and now are not so happy in the yard.....   But, with spring comes more progress on website work. 

We continue to make progress on the job function - always important!  I spent yesterday working on creating searches to go with some of the links on the new website.  Found this very fascinating and rewarding work ~ so much so that I forgot it was Monday and "blog day."

In the meantime, have you seen this New York Times gizmo?  Quite an interesting new take on the tag cloud concept - it would be fun to put up something like this for a hot new title.  Are you finding things like this?  New stuff?  Interactive?  Pray tell.....here!  (thx to Douglas for pointing this out!)