|
Purpose
* area
* money
* short-cuts
* plans
* updates
* thanks
Purpose
To promote Largs and District for residents and tourists, and provide community information online.
This should be seen as being complementary to traditional sources of information such as the Largs
and Millport Weekly News. An important part of marketing Largs and tourism is our innovative
"Iceberg Portal" family of commercial projects, which are underway now, though understandably slowly
(Scotland like the rest of the UK gives absolutely no support to its talent, which will also become
a topic on this site). The website is also used to help publicise action plans and issues
in the town such as the Largs Initiative and the Common Good Fund.
Geographical area
Largs is being covered initially as it's necessary to focus our efforts, but there are many
interactions and good relationships with surrounding towns such as Millport and Kilbirnie,
which have websites reserved by locals already, and the rest of the area covered by the wee paper.
Tourists and locals like to tour, strangely enough, and further away towns or islands such as
Ayr, Irvine, Arran, Rothesay and Bute, Dunoon, Gourock, Greenock and even Oban and Skye will be briefly
covered later on, with attractions such as The Big Idea. Co-operation between competitive tourist
areas will help to increase tourism overall.
Webnames are being bought up at a furious rate now, and parts of the internet real estate of
Scotland are owned by Celtic dot com in the US who provide free email names, some by fairly new
domain resale operations in Malaysia and Korea, others held or transferred to Nucom, Webhound
and more such as bute.com by London based outfits or ISPs. Keeping some ownership in local hands
we registered largs.org and other sites, though now we've let these go.
Money
While largs.org and sister sites were not registered to make a profit, they will take advertising
revenues and sponsorships, and may sell a limited range of goods. The business plan is to make this
website self-supporting by May 2001 (better make that 2002 ...),
and be able later to pay for freelance correspondents and
officers, including all technical support for these sites. This activity should
NOT however be at the expense of existing and traditional locally based traders,
but augment and strengthen their business.
Within the gTLD (general Top Level Domain) of "org", www.largs.org is by convention a non-profit
organisation, though this is changing now so many "dot coms" have been taken. We have no
shareholders and largs.org is privately owned. Any profit after wages, expenses and
marketing costs may be
used for local projects - sponsoring beach play leaders such as we used to have, towards a
skateboard and rollerblade facility, or to new walks or cycle paths. Maybe just to the old
Common Good Fund.
Authors
The owner and webmaster - Dave Eastabrook - wrote his first Fortran program in 1968 and has been
changing it ever since, though in many different languages and places! He's presently using Perl for
the CGI processing for this website and adding SSI; both of which will enable the interactive features
promised back in April - such as the chat room already in use now, web boards, games,
automated opinion surveys, and trusted organisation or business web-based update facilities.
Unlike politicians we like to deliver. Keep watching! We're also interested in hearing
from local web-authors and designers, graphics designers, software authors and others.
At the least we'll give you CV space. At best you might find yourself with paid work in the future,
or even as a full "Iceberg Portal Partner".
Accesskeys
Some browsers support accesskey usage or short-cuts (IE4 but not NN4 for example), and we use them
for common links. You can jump to the tourism index page by holding down the "Alt"
key and then pressing the access key "t", for instance.
This is a bonus feature and regular alternatives exist.
- accesskey letters used all over:
z=home, l=leisure, j=tourism, o=travel, y=business, i=info
- specials with limited localised usage:
k=vikings, q=query (or search), r=room (hotel, B&B), x=exit
- available for later use: o, u and y
- not usable (used by some browsers): a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,p,s,t,u and v
- not usable (annoying actions with Ctrl+letter): m,n and w
- Memory aid: z=home by the left-hand Alt key
Plans
1. Increase the fun and interactivity of the site - games etc.
2. Create the renewable personalisation page, e.g. don't want popups
3. Get, take and make a better main page picture
4. Improve common page logos, left and right
5. Famous people - Kelvin, Brisbane, Torrance, Nardini ...
6. Review use of popups through the site - they might be taken off
7. Do the same for eating and drinking as for hotels and guest houses
8.
9. Introduce a current (possibly paid by us) newsfeed and What's On guide
99. Get this page finished, though of course it never will be!
999. Fully test cross-browser compatibility
Updates
While the site is still in its initial stages it's too unstable to keep track of updates.
Even if whole sections are renamed it's unlikely these will be tracked. The
error404 page
may help, and become a site map. Stability target date: 30th June 2001.
Thanks
Thanks to Harry McEachan for his Vikings, Jim Perman for the Common Good, Ken Welch for
The Largs Initiative Business Strategy Plan. The wee paper for publishing the
"Birth
of Largs Internet site" article.
Mike MacKenzie for material from the Historical
Society, Adrienne Kirk Alcock for links and pointing out errors on the site, John Cunningham for
suggesting we cover Fairlie and further, Lee Welsh for beautiful photos of Cumbrae.
And an increasing number of people now for their praise, encouragement, interest - and chat!
Please come back often as having established the basic - simple we hope - design and navigation,
this site is now officially growing fast (90 pages
on 10th May 2001, though some of them are still "skeletons").
Bobby from CAST, the Center
for Applied Special Technology, analyses web pages for
maximum accessibility, including for many
people with disabilities such as blindness. We support this while trying to make this site
interactive and modern. Warning: popup windows are used extensively on the site but
text alternatives should always exist.
|
