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SITE OF THE WEEK

Sometimes you just have to pat yourself on the back. This week a woman from New York City called to say GOseacoast is the best regional site she's every seen -- and she spends all day online. So here's the backstaroy as it first appeared in Fosters Sunday Citizen many long years ago.

VISIT the GOseacoast web site

Each web site starts with an idea you just can’t shake, and the simple ones are the worst. Why, I kept asking myself, isn’t there a list of all the cool places to go in the seacoast?

About 10 years ago I wrote a list -- just out of curiosity --. from Seabrook, New Hampshire to Kennebunkport, Maine. It grew into a pretty comprehensive list of historic sites, galleries, museums, scenic spots, theaters. When I was done there were about 250 items in about 40 towns.

A smarter guy would have left the list on a bus. Instead, I asked a designer who was working for me at the time to compile the lists into a couple of maps, one for the NH coast, one for Maine. She drew them on PageMakrer back at the dawn of computer graphics. It took ages. Then I hired a couple of guys in my video crew to drive to all 250 locations and shoot these sites, inside and out, for weeks and weeks on end. Then we assembled the video footage into two feature-length VHS tapes with a studio musical soundtrack and I hired another designer to create a full color cardboard sleeve so they looked just like Hollywood productions . You don’t want to know how much all that cost. One box cover alone, as I remember, came to $3,000 for design and printing.

They’re great travel videos and I sold enough to pay back my expenses, at least, but distributing thousands of tapes turned into a nightmare. Take away the cost of production, 50% discount to retailers, duplication and other costs and a $19.95 tape yields about $1 income to the guy who had the idea. And as much as I love movies, tapes age. Information goes out of date and isn’t instantly accessible when you want it.

So when the Internet came along I recycled a lot of the information gathered for the video onto my first web site. But that was back in 1996 and the data continued to shift and change, and it was a pain to repair it even online in the old html system. Then along came databases, and although a brighter guy would have given up long ago, I kept asking myself why there was still no clickable list of all the cool places to go in the Seacoast.

So last year I started all over again, pulling out the old maps, revising the list, taking photographs, calling for details. This time I wanted to add more information – directions, admission prices, phone numbers, links, detailed descriptions. I was creating the web site that I wished someone else had done for me. Most, but not all of the 250 original locations have been added to the database. (I’m still working my way back up the South Maine Coast). In the process, I’ve come up with another 200 places that will make it into the database eventually. It isn’t really done yet, but it’s online. It’s called GOseacoast.com. I was afraid that might sound like a list of public rest rooms, but there’s only so much angst you can spend on one dumb idea.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

Editor's Note: M23D is now Hatchling Studios

I first took this idea to a web design company that will go unmentioned. We talked about it for six months, signed all sorts of legal contracts, and the whole thing came crashing down. Then Marc Dole of M2-3D, whom I had known for years as a talented computer animator, agreed to give it a shot. M2-3D donated about half the work and I paid for the rest. We hammered out the database design and they built it in Cold Fusion.

"Can this database search by town?" I asked. "Can it search by key words too, by alphabet, by category? Can I use a large picture? Can I change the data quickly? Can I replace categories whenever I like?"

I knew I sounded like a kid in a toy store, but the crew at M2-3D, including designer Jeremy Clough and programmer Greg Shreive, never batted an eye. They added a bunch of neat features too, like a "Print This Page" button that lets users get a clean copy of any listing in seconds. Run off all the pages, bind them in a notebook, and you have a guidebook to the region.

Why did you help with GOseacoast?" I asked Marc Dole at our site-launch meeting the other day. Here’s what he said:

"It’s a presence, sure. We want to show off what we can do, but it’s more than that," he replied. "We’re all enjoying and living in this community and this is a way we can show off the region and give back to the region at the same time."

Dole has more community projects in the works. On Market Square Day M2-3D will unveil a working prototype of an digital kiosk system that may be the wave of the future for disseminating local information. The plan is to display key information, mixed with advertising, on a 42-inch computer monitor. Viewers can see updated events listings, theater and movie times, trolley and bus schedules, lists of historic houses, weather – any info – on a constantly changing colorful screen. The sample will go in a store window, but unit could be available in bars, hotel lobbies, anywhere people gather.

Dole’s crew is also working on a computer animation of the tall ship Ranger. It’s a stunningly realistic film showing the 1777 tall ship in full sail moving up the Piscataqua River, all rendered in great detail. I only got to see a few cells of the animation, but you can imagine how effective it will be as a tool to encourage contributions to the Ranger Foundation that hopes to rebuild John Paul Jones sloop of war. A project of this scale would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.

"Yes, it’s a lot of volunteer time and effort on our part," Dole says, "but we have no body telling us – no we can’t do that. We’re doing it anyway."

THE UP SHOT

Creating a web site is hard enough, but creating a web site people will actually visit -- again and again – is even tougher. As a consultant, I often hear from people who want help building traffic to their site. I tell them, to build solid, repeat traffic, you need to have something worth seeing. You have to have a lot of content that no one else has, and you have to keep adding content. Then you need to make that content easily accessible to the dumbest user you can imagine. I’m not knocking my users; it’s just the way the Web works. People will give you four or five seconds, and if they can’t find the right button or get what they want – sianara, baby!

Building web sites is one thing, but living with one (or in my case now – four of them) on a daily basis, requires effort. Web sites need to be changed, updated, hosted, redesigned, expanded and rethought constantly. Without constant attention, they can turn as rancid as a forgotten piece of uncooked chicken in the fridge.

Think about that the next time you get one of those clever ideas you can’t shake off. Think hard.

But if you absolutely must turn your idea into a web site, and you have the time, the content and the cash and drive, here’s a little secret – it’s worth it! One little piece of this chaotic Universe suddenly makes sense, and it’s all yours. You own it. You run it. You make the rules. So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my version of the Seacoast. Admission is free. Littering is a capital offense. Please wipe your feet on the way in.