The WebCommons Blog

Check out the results at this topic on Louisville History & Issues.

Seeing what visitors actually do on a discussion board not only triggers brainstorms for positive functional changes and a significant re-orientation of what content is developed.

Analytics are also letting me know, brutally, of the limitations of the discussion board approach to creating a thriving online “community”.

How does one really go about creating an “open discussion zone” that keeps people sticking around, and better yet, participating?

I just wanted to take a moment and welcome all the new visitors who may be coming here as a result of new advertising I have started as of this weekend.

When you boil it all down, I am what’s commonly referred to as a “web geek”. 

More specifically, if you need to have a website created (or revised) that needs to do more than just sit there, but do something active, like interact with users, get people to buy something from you, or do something with a database, I’m the guy to talk to.

Check out my Specialties & Pricing page for various ways that I can assist you in your website development needs.  Note: I am constantly adding more things I can do for clients, so what’s on the page may not be “complete”.

Whether or not you think that WebCommons web programming services is the right fit for your needs, please feel free to contact me and start a conversation!  I won’t bite! You may be surprised with all the possibilities!

Thanks for reading!

I just wanted to let everyone know that the WebCommons site crashed yesterday due to some MySQL tables getting inexplicably locked. The restoration of the data has left some things a bit messy. I will attempt to clean up most of it today.

Of course, I don’t want anyone to think this is the final incarnation of the WebCommons site. It is really just a start of a new approach. In reality, all websites stay in flux, and what is here now is just the culmination of moving much of the old content from other WebCommons locations to this WordPress-based site.

But I really do want to know: What do you think, and how can I make this site better? What can I do better to explain what it is that WebCommons does? What information am I missing, except for a visual portfolio (I already have plans for reinstating that).

By the way, if readers of this site can’t easily figure out that WebCommons does programming for websites, and what that means for their web development needs, I’m in big trouble!

As part of the ongoing WebCommons site merger, I developed a new contact form.   I realize that this kind of development naturally doesn’t create a lot of excitement, but I think a lot of the power of the WordPress platform shines through with this example.

A contact form is one of those common things that a web programmer shouldn’t want to re-invent, so I went plugin shopping at the WordPress site and found a straightforward, well-ranked, WordPress 2.7-compatible plugin called Contact Form 7.   I was especially charmed that it had easy-to-setup CAPTCHA and Akismet support (great for stopping spammers!), and upon my initial testing of it, I was pleasantly surprised at how robust and straightforward the admin-side contact form management was.

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