"No School On Sunset Lane" Meeting

An email I received:

Dear fellow Sunset Lane neighbor,

"No School on Sunset Lane" will be holding an informational meeting at Nye Park on Saturday May, 19, at 4:00pm.

Anyone who opposes this 180,000 sq/ft school complex being built on Sunset Lane is invited.

We will explain this issue's current status and the next step in our opposition to it.

Remember, this is NOT about Learning Gate itself. It IS about them wanting to build on a two-lane rural road which is already operating beyond its design capacity.

Our primary concerns are the significantly negative impact this will have on:
 - traffic on Sunset Lane
 - our beautifully pristine natural wetlands
 - potable water supply
 - the leasing of Nye Park by Learning Gate

We are also concerned about this new Learning Gate school being the first "field test" of an experimental process for turning HUMAN WASTE into potable water.

NOW is the time to stand up for YOUR community and our rural way of life.

Regards,

Mike White

Websites, Blogs, Facebook and Community Organizations - Part One

These days if a business or organization does not have a web presence, it does not exist.  That’s not really true, but without that presence an organization loses a great opportunity to engage the public, get its message out, increase membership and funding / donations.

There is a cemetery in Lutz, on US Hwy 41, a few blocks north of the Old Lutz Schoolhouse.  What is its history?  How do you get interred there? Who is buried there already?  Where could you donate to keep it maintained?  An internet search provides almost zero information, except that there was an inactive organization called Lutz Cemetery Association.

There is an organization called Lutz Volunteer Fire Association Inc.   If you wanted to learn more about the organization or become a member you would have to wait for the yearly mailing, because the only information available on the internet is the address and the corporation registration documents.

Many organizations choose not to have a web presence because they don't have the expertise to create website or can't afford to pay someone to develop and maintain one.

Some organizations get a grant to have a website created.  However they don't have the operating funds to update the website as needed. Or a volunteer with web site design skills creates a site and later leaves the organization.  Case in point is the Lutz Civic Association lutzcivicassociation.org. The last updates were photos from 2010 Guv'na race.  Much of the site is "Coming Soon".  Any emails kick back because the mailbox is full.

There are many different free websites that organizations can use.  However sometimes the results have not been very attractive.  Some are not easy to use. Some place ads on the site over which you have no control.    Some are tied in with your internet provider and if you change providers you lose the site.

I have created sites using a variety of these including Yahoo's Geocities, Google Sites, Blogger, and Wordpress.  The best free website site I have found is Weebly.com.

Weebly is easy to use, looks good, can be customized if you have the skills, has an integrated blog  is easy to maintain and update, and can be integrated with your own domain name.

My wife's site SusanBanghart.com, my personal site DavidBanghart.com and the Lutz Dog Park site http://lutzdogpark.weebly.com/ are all weebly sites.  The only thing that tells you it is a free site is a small notice at the bottom.  "Create a free website with Weebly"  If you go with the paid version that notice is not there. I consider that small notice an acceptable trade off for a free site.

The first step to creating a site for your organization is to create a Google email in the name of your organization.  This way you can easily pass off to the email address and website to others in the organization if you leave. For example I created Lutz Dog Park1@ gmail.com for the Dog Park site.  I forward that email address to my personal address to get all emails that come in without having to login separately to Google.

I like using Google for the email because of the many affiliated features such as Google Documents / Google Drive, Google Voice, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Plus, Google Photos / Picasa Web Albums and more. These all can help make it easier to run your organization better or to better publicize it.  Later I will go over each of these.

In further blog articles I will go over actually creating a Weebly site, marketing  the site, getting it listed on search engines and.improving that listing.  My hope is that at the end of these articles Lutz groups that don't have websites will feel comfortable enough to start and maintain a site.