Your Internet Business Card
A small website may be the most efficient and effective means to tell the world you exist, what you are trying to accomplish and how they can interact constructively with your development goals.
Where are you?
Place the primary geographic identifier at or very near the top of the page (such as in the title). If you are doing community development, you probably should have it in the URL as well. There should be at least one other identifier towards the bottom of the page.
In the US, you need city and state at a minimum. Ideally: City, state, zip code and USA plus at least one other geographic identifier, such as county, common nickname, common abbreviations, or a nearby better known and more easily findable larger city.
The city of Seward, Nebraska is best known for its large Independence Day celebration. It is the county seat for Seward County and is part of the Lincoln, Nebraska Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city was platted in 1868 and got rail service in 1873. It is the location of Concordia University-Nebraska. This community is for all of Seward County, the cities, towns and villages within.
Manhattan, Kansas -- "The Little Apple" -- a city an hour from the state capital of Topeka with 54,000 residents, including nearly 20,000 college students and ~3600 faculty and staff at Kansas State University, the oldest public university in the state and a land-grant college. Last I checked, 10 percent of the population were military families stationed at Ft. Riley, a 30 minute drive away. When it opened, KSU was the 2nd US public institution of higher learning to admit men and women equally.
If you wish to hire someone to do a site for you, you still need to brainstorm a list of geographic identifiers. Your webmaster for hire may have no means of knowing typical local place names and nicknames.
In San Diego County, locals refer to the northern part of the county as North County. In Atlanta, Georgia, ATL -- the airport code -- is an identifier commonly used by locals that I've seen people on the Internet stumped by.
How do you get there?
For a town in the contiguous "lower 48 states" of the continental US, this will typically be a map showing major infrastructure like Interstate highways and local airports. In Alaska, it may not give a road because there aren't a lot and may instead list ferries and landing strips.
For a business location or other public building location in the US, you ideally should also include the nearest bus stop or similar pedestrian friendly information. If there's a bike rack nearby for locking up your bike, say so and indicate where.
See for example: Where is Aberdeen, Washington?
This piece (below) states you should list a phone number. That was advice for cities in the US and people doing this professionally. It may not be what you want.
Your takeaway should be that people who want to know more should have a reliable means to connect with you which you will reply to in a timely fashion.
An email address that you check regularly or which forwards to one you check regularly may be sufficient. Consider your privacy and safety when deciding what contact information to list.
A small website can be like a business card for the planet to read and can summarize the main points you want the world to know. This can be extremely helpful and lightweight for a small organization.
If you don't have an extremely compelling reason to commit to frequent updates of constantly changing new information, you should try hard to avoid such. It can take all your time while making you look bad rather than being an asset.
For privacy and security reasons, I recommend against putting a lot of personal information on it, like your photo and your name and where you are likely to be found regularly ("Weekly meeting at 9am open to the public and here's my photo!"). That information is mostly meaningful to LOCALS who can get it someplace other than the world wide web and it's potentially a means for a random criminal to take advantage of locals.
You do NOT NEED a PERSONAL relationship to the entire planet. You aren't trying to be a celebrity.
Instead, state THREE overarching goals for the community and add a bit of helpful detail for each. You want to tell people how they can interact with your goals and WHY they might wish to do so.
A need your community has may be a business opportunity for someone else.
But again think about safety and how someone might misuse this information. Try to err on the side of safety and first do no harm.
Double check your information or ask someone else to do so. My initial description of Manhattan, Kansas listed Tacoma -- a city in Washington State near where I was living -- instead of Topeka. Someone actually messaged me about the mistake. I didn't catch it myself.
If you include a photo, try to make it somehow representative of the area and try to not include people. The photo on the landing page (below) is out of date and those buildings no longer look that way, but it's a block in the heart of downtown with a mural related to the band Nirvana. The town is best known for being the hometown of the band Nirvana and murals are a big thing there.
