In the past nine and a half years I have gone from a high-stress corporate position to a home office, and I gotta tell ya... it is heaven! My passion for local history has everything to do with this change of lifestyle, as odd as that may sound. The intent of this blog is to let others in on my experiences with the hope that they see how easy it is and perhaps start a local history site of their own.
In 1997, I began to realize there was more to my hometown than streets and houses, I found myself in the history section of the local library quite a bit. Next, I started requesting access to church basements and newpaper archives to expand the search for history. It finally got to a point where much of my free-time was spent looking for new information, the problem was, in most cases the materials were rare and I could not take them home. At that time the internet bubble was still alive and well so I decided to explore the cost of developing a web site dedicated to the history of my hometown: Redding, Connecticut.
After a brief search I found a designer in Farifeld, Connecticut and headed down there to discuss my hopes and dreams. My hopes and dreams were going to cost me $2,200.00 and future dreams would run $35 an hour. I didn't have that kind of money to spend at the time but I did have enough to purchase Microsoft Front Page...I would learn HTML and create the site myself!
I did and as lame as it was (look wise) it was a web site and I spent countless hours re-typing copies of the documents I had found in libraries and basements into Front Page. All in all this took me 3 months, which was aided largely by a scanner. When it was time to go live, I had about 20 pages covering topics like: Early Settlement, Early Family Names, Town Incorporation, Photos of Town, Farms. The hit counter grew everytime I visited it, which was often, but others were slow to find it. [Things moved a little slower back then when it came to searchbots.] Eventually I entered the rankings of Yahoo and Lycos and people started emailing me about the site and its contents.
The surprising thing about a local history web site is visitors...most come from outside of the town you are focusing on. Some people used to live in town and long to come back, so they come looking for pictures and stories, others have found an ancestors name on your pages and want to know if their is more information available. Visitors that e-mail you about the site really make the long hours worthwhile, they offer praise, new material and sometimes a J-O-B. Two months on the world wide web and I was offered a position as a web designer...a job I really didn't have any formal training for. The timing was right though and I gladly accepted their offer as it was a 35% pay raise.
My days of commuting were over for good but as I came to find out, working from home has a downside...dealing with co-workers who don't. A constant stream of phone calls and emails came in day after day, "whatcha working on?", "I need a report on your projects", "how we looking for next billing period?", etc... It got old real quick, I was creating more reports on what I was doing than web sites. What I came to realize was life would be much easier if I didn't have to answer to anyone else so I purchased a puppy and gave my 2 week notice.
My puppy, Bailey, became the best co-worker I'd ever had. Every morning we'd get up and go for a 5-6 mile hike (the morning commute), I'd feed him and get a cup a coffee for myself before heading into the office to start work. At twelve noon on-the-dot Bailey would get up, stretch and gently grab my shirtsleeve, pulling my hand off the mouse, we'd then head out for our lunchtime "commute" a mile or so stroll, then it was back to work until five or six when we'd head out to the woods for the evening commute before dinner.
Life was good, I had my own web design company, was newly married and had little responsibility outside of house and car payments. I filled free-time between client projects with history updates. The site continued to grow with the help of people all of the world sending photos and content via email and in some cases snail mail but it needed a new look now that I was designing sites for a living and my own site reflected my "skills" poorly. I had switched from FrontPage to Dreamweaver and Photoshop on the client side so it made sense to convert the history site as well.
Easier said than done! FrontPage and Dreamweaver do not play nice together. FrontPage tags are a little different and because it was designed to help non-technical types there are a ton of issues when you open it in Macromedia's Dreamweaver. The result was a complete re-do which took months. But it was well worth the effort, local history sites will be visited more often if navigation is made easy for the visitor and in my second site I made sure I expanded the list of topics and repeated the same navigation menu bar on each and every page. This resulted in increased page views and return visits.
After the redesign in 2002, I started paying more attention to site stats. By watching the site traffic reports on a weekly basis [instead of monthly] I began to see visitation trends that resulted from "current news topics" that tied to past events, people or businesses. This was a new concept to me but it was logical, people read about a history topic in the newspaper and then logged on to see if they could find out more about the topic online. If your going to make a local history site be sure to have some way to add information on your own, either via a blog or content management system. Relying on web designers for updates will at times lessen your ability to "strike while the irons hot" when a current topic pops up that you have historic documention about but haven't posted online.
Site traffic reports will also help you understand where people are entering and exiting your site from. This was important for me because after the redesign I found that a new section I had created for Georgetown, Connecticut which was meant to help people looking for topics relating to Georgetown (a sub-section of Redding) was confusing people who went to the Georgetown section from the Homepage...they never saw the Redding links and thought the whole site was about Georgetown and exited. Big mistake on my part, but with the help of the site traffic reports it was corrected.
From 2002 to 2004 history flowed like the Hudson, but then it happened..."honey, we're pregnant!!" Our daughter, Emma, arrived the day before Thanksgiving of 2004 and doubt I did more than answer emails about history for the next 4-5 months. The site went into hybernation and without fresh content the return visits started to fade. It was apparent that time needed to be spent to make up for what I'd lost over the winter so when spring arrived in 2005 I grabbed my digital camera and headed down to Redding. Photos are a huge draw at my site so fresh pictures are always a big hit, they were. As luck would have it at the same time a photos collection of the Georgetown section went up for sale on Ebay so I was able to showcase that part of town too. The rest of 2005 and 2006 were a blur, between work, family and history there were very few day I'd consider "down-time".
So that that brings us to 2007. This May my wife was looking over my shoulder one evening and said the site needs some life, it's too dark and stale. Now that's my baby she's knockin' so I wasn't too pleased initially but it got me thinking and a couple nights later I had come up with a completely new look. That was the easy part, the hard part was converting 200+ pages into the new format...I'm still finding pages I missed. While I was converting pages and part of the reason the site still has some pages in need of updating, my wife went into labor and we headed over to the hospital where she delivered our son, Liam. Seeing that we are now seasoned veterans in Baby 101, the "history blackout of 2004" is not being re-visited but I will admit it is still no easy task juggling life, work and hobby.
So that is where I am at on July 10th 2007 and above is [in a nut-shell] how I got here. In future posts I will write about topics relating to Local History Web Sites...creating them, making them better, things I've learned in the process of building mine, etc... Local History is a topic that is growing and I think once more people take a peek at what it has to offer, the more will come to enjoy it.
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