Well gang, we’ve been on the Internet for one year. I hope that the site will one day meet the expectations I have set.

Though I am pleased with the layout, look and functionality of the site, I still don’t feel that the site has accomplished what I wanted it to do. In my first news story I laid out the goals for the site as this:

“The important thing to remember is, though the site may focus on the five of us. This is a venue for all Family and Friends. I hope this can be a central location where we can chat, post family news/events, and share some pictures and stories. Ultimately, this site is about us....all of us.”

Please, don’t take this as me complaining to our registered users, I’ve already done that in a blog, and a few of you have become active users. Instead, this is more of a retrospective look on the past year and an informative talk on things to come.

One year ago, we had absolutely no web presence. You might ask why does that matter? In the whole scheme of life…it doesn’t really matter. However, how many of you have tried to run a search on someone you lost touch with? How frustrated do you get when your only hits on a search engine are from classmates.com or reunion.com? I know I get sick of it. I’m not going to pay for a service to get contact information that may or may not be correct.

Unfortunately…the site hasn’t come close to reaching its designed communication potential. I know for a fact, that a lot happened over this past year. We’ve had a marriage, three children, a new house, hurricanes, surgeries, ups and downs and who knows how many pictures taken! Unless I write about it, it doesn’t get mentioned.

In the following year, I’m going to try and help the site along so we can hit that goal I set a year ago.

First, to our current and future users:

• Submit news…tell us what’s going on. If you have pictures and you want to share them, send them to me and I’ll post them.
• If you need to bitch about anything, tell us something or just blab-on about absolutely nothing, use the blog section.
• If you think someone’s blog is full of crap or right-on, make a comment.
• If you want to have a discussion about visits, vacations, a get together or whatever use the forum and start a thread.
• Do you see a registered user you haven’t talked to in a while? Drop them an Instant Message by using the site.

I know when we finally get around to sending out birth announcements; I’m going to include the web site address with the mailing, in an attempt to get more registered users.

I have also verified a sitemap with Google. Our site is ranked #4 when conducting a search for ‘Gierlach’. If you conduct a search with any of our full names, we will be the #1 or #2 hit. This makes our site, a pretty easy site to find on the net.

I’m also utilizing some pretty spiffy web analytics tools. I’m hoping I can learn a little about how traffic flows on the site. See if I can find any problem areas, and make appropriate changes.   

Overall, I think it’s been a pretty good year for thegierlachs.us. Though cliché, I think web sites (like this one) need to learn to crawl, before they can walk. I’m not certain about us crawling yet, but I think we’re starting to rock back and forth.

For those that took the time to read this, thank you. With your help and participation we can truly make this site a hub to share our lives with each other.

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