WOW! What a Difference a Week Makes! Where to start.... Since I began this blog and really launched my serious research into what WYSE needs to do to get our new web presence and WYSE Community Communication System (I just made that up...but I like it) in place, so much has fallen in my lap and I am energized and inspired. Day 1: I did an orientation with two new board interns who were recruited from RVLDP. http://www.lajcc.org/rvldp/index.html They are both women, although we tried to recruit men. These women are like walking/talking gifts to our organization. One of them has extensive web marketing and development experience and connections. She is one of the most intelligent techie females I have ever spoken to. I have asked her to be my co-project manager for our website development team. She accepted! Day 2: I was doing some searching in idealist.org to find web development companies that specialize in non profit work. I found a GREAT company that has a simply amazing website development team and I am now in talks with them to see if our project can be done within our nearly non existent budget. I was inspired when my contact over at jvmediadesign.com mentioned keeping things simple by installing WordPress and building the site from there. I had already decided that Wordpress was the blogging tool for WYSE. I even created a personal blog at Wordpress.com to test things out. Even with the limited features that come with the free blog, WordPress serves our needs much more readily than Blogger. Day 3&4: I downloaded all sorts of trial version/freeware versions of CMS software. Since then...I have been told that WordPress may be a CMS option. We shall see how that pans out. I liked NVU's interface. Day 5: Took a breather. Day 6: I was exploring the FAQ at WordPress and found more free web tools than I can list. I found a place to host and share files with 1G free space: box.net I found a place to host video content that can be seamlessly played on our site: Splashcast. I saw a NetSquared Editor's Splashcast after I logged on. That's a good sign! I also spoke to my Program Officer at our fiscal sponsor organization, Communitypartners.org, and he told me there is a woman who may be interested in volunteering 10 hours a week with WYSE. She has an MBA in Marketing and Strategy. This is something that fits our web presence and long range goals for establishing our "branding", for lack of a better term. I'm excited!