It’s up! It’s live! It’s waiting for you to sign up!
There is a lot of functionality to our revamped website and we will describe and explain new features in our summer newsletters. Once you have finished looking at the Site and feeling your way around, to get the most out of it, I encourage everyone to find a “Way to Support” Oxtongue Lake and become either a “Member” or a “Booster.” It is the best way to continue to receive these newsletters and to show your support as somebody whose interested in Oxtongue. It’s also the best way to take advantage of the full functionality of the Site. A list of common questions is provided to explain the Members and Boosters and if you struggle with anything on the site, at the very bottom of the Site is a Help & Tip page.
A bit of history. It began a few winters ago when some brave souls started to transition the Site into one that would suit residents, cottagers and vacationers. Since that time, there has been much input, testing, creativity and proofing. We have also been blessed with significant technological advances, which have opened up cost-effective opportunities for small site’s such as our own, and for people that don’t want to mess with code or complicated set-ups behind the scenes.
The Site is not perfect yet, and there are still some pages to complete, but our newest resident and Member, Mark Sherman is a web and graphic designer. Mark has been focused on providing us with a new logo, which we are excited to display, and he will now begin to work on tweaking the Site over the coming year. Technology keeps changing (just last week there were some major breakthroughs) so even more creativity is possible on a budget! We are very fortunate to welcome Mark to the team and to Oxtongue, and we are extremely grateful for the hours he put into our new logo and the many more he will put in as our new Lead Web Administrator (Wendy will remain as a back-up). If you notice any problems or suggestions, please email ola@oxtonguelake.com and we can try to fix them as quickly as possible. We experienced some recent difficulties in migrating the site from our temporary one, which may have rendered previous testing ineffective and we have not caught everything. But we would like to get it out to you now rather then wait.
You will also notice that we are putting on an Oxtongue Photo Contest that will begin on Canada Day (details below). We are hoping that (with permission) we will also be able to use some of the submissions on the public side of the Site and newsletters for the future.
As is my general theme, it’s the people that have made this Site come to be and while the list is long, everyone has made a significant contribution to the final product.
Thanks to: Melissa Alfano, Brandi Bailey, Paul Bailey, Wilbur Blackman, Mike Cavanagh, Joan Diamond, Laura Embree, Jodi Ferguson, Jim Grant, Scott Hayden, Naguib Kerba, Marlene Kyle, John Lawrence, Rick & Wendy Linklater, Janine Marson, Jenny McGuire, Diane Morgan, Amanda Pass, Mark Sherman, Betsy Siegfried, James Smith, Tom Smith, Chris & Jan Woods, and the rest of the OLA executive for my many emails! And last, but certainly not least, is Nora Heuer at Baytides Management Inc. (www.baytides.ca) for her many hours logged in helping us learn the process, offering her advice and her most recent frustrations in migrating the temporary site to the live one.
Happy Surfing!