WEBSITE UPDATES - History of Recent Changes

April 17, 2007

Updated information about the Old Southwest 28th Annual Parlor Tour of Homes. Information posted about upcoming ARB public hearing.

April 14, 2007

April home of the month information and photo now online.

April 10, 2007

Easter Egg hunt pictures now online. Updated information about the upcoming "OSW Help A Neighbor" event. Updated Members Calendar with new events for April. Don't forget about this weekend's events: Food and Friends (Saturday) and the OSW Safety Dinner/Walk (Sunday).

March 27, 2007

Updated the Neighborhood News page with new information about the upcoming "OSW Help A Neighbor" event. Updated Members Calendar with new events for April.

March 19, 2007

The implementation of the new members section is complete! Check it out by clicking here! Please report any bugs or issues! Thanks! ~Josh

March 18, 2007

Uploaded the new members only section. It's not yet "open", but I wanted to keep everybody up to date on the progress! Currently I'm doing the final configuring and debugging of the new section and hope to have it  online within the next few days. The new section will include member forums, a graphical calendar function, and private messaging between registered members. This update, I've also added news about our big win in yesterday's St. Patrick's Day Parade Competition, added the March Home of the Month, and added a privacy statement regarding the use of member information on the expanded website.

March 15, 2007

Updated calendar of events. New or updated information about St. Patrick's Day parade, March Feasting and Fellowship (March 17), and a public rally in support of our City Police Department. New information about upcoming safety events and a safety update in the news section of the site.

March 8, 2007

Updated calendar of events. New information about St. Patrick's Day parade float building (March 10), St. Patrick's Day parade and festivities (March 17), March Feasting and Fellowship (March 17), and the Annual Easter Egg Hunt Eggstravaganza (April 7). Added a link to access the OSW webmail system for authorized users. Updated Newsletters page- most recent newsletter mailings now available in Adobe .PDF format.

March 1, 2007

Progress on the new website slowly continues as I formulate new ideas and create new materials. This evening I updated the Calendar of Events to reflect information on several new events throughout the month and year. To further help OSW residents and members remember and know about neighborhood events, I've added a scrolling "ticker tape" to the main homepage that will be updated regularly with events. Don't forget that March 17th is the St. Patrick's Day Parade and OSW is going to be participating! Come and ride our float or walk the route with us!

In addition to the calendar of events, some minor changes have been made with tonight's update. I fixed two links that were misdirecting when clicked, added the January and February Home of the Month, and cleaned up some general formatting issues that have been brought to my attention. Thanks to all that have pointed out the (fortunately few) minor errors on the site.

I have also added a "last updated" line at the bottom of the main homepage, so that you can see when the last major site update was uploaded and track changes to the site (for those of you that are interested). From the bottom of the front homepage, you can click on the link at the top of the page (website updates) to see details of the update (on this page).

In the next month I hope to begin beta testing the new members area and add additional features to several of the areas including the Home of the Month pages and Neighborhood pages. Tim Taylor is working on a section on why people moving to the Roanoke area should consider Old Southwest as a place to live or establish a business. If you have any other additions to this section, please email me. Also, the OSW business directory continues to grow- if you know of a business that hasn't been listed (and there are MANY), please email me with the details so I can put it into our directory!  

February 2007

A bold new look and a revamped website! We were notified in early January that our web designer Whitney Anderson from Automated Horizons was going to be moving on to bigger and better things. She had generously donated time and energy into developing our site and keeping things updated in a timely manner. However with her departure, the Board of Directors was faced with a decision- continue to employ an outside web programmer to maintain and develop our website, or come up with another solution? Since the costs of outside expertise were hard to justify for our organization, we decided to bring the website "in-house." 

I've volunteered to revamp the site and add new features and materials as the year progresses. Please feel free to offer feedback, suggestions, and constructive criticism. This new site was built from bottom up, using an entirely different software package from the old website, and probably still has a few kinks to work out... I'm not an expert and web programming is certainly but a hobby, but I hope that we can all find the new website to be an improved and more functional site for the membership.

In the upcoming months I hope to add some new features to the site, including interactive discussion forums for the membership and an online photo gallery, as well as developing a secured online directory of members so that folks can voluntarily post their contact information as a method of building stronger relationships between neighbors. We are also researching the feasibility of online membership renewals and other improvements to OSW membership communications via the website.

If you have any suggestions on any particular features or articles that you would like to see added to the website, please feel free to contact me! Also if you come across any links that don't work or don't connect to the correct page, please make a note of them (please include the particular link and the address of the page) and let me know that as well so that I can continue to work out the bugs.

Josh Shields (Director/Webmaster)

josh.shields@oldsouthwestinc.com