More than you ever wanted to know about Alabama native Joe Watts
Just finished a draft of the Top of Alabama Regional Council of Governments (TARCOG) website. Still some changes to make and a few compatibility issues to overcome (thanks Internet Explorer 7!), but looking good so far. Lots of capacity built in, including some cool mapping features. All built in WordPress, of course!
Wow! A little over a year ago, I started working the Center for Economic Development on the University of Alabama campus on a project with the Alabama Tourism Department. We took the project over from a consultant who had done a good bit of initial work into organizing folks. We held the first of four kick-offs last week, this one for the Piedmont Plateau Birding Trail. We’ll be doing the other 3, along with some additional work on 4 that already exist to varying degrees in Alabama, over the next year. For now, explore the Piedmont Plateau Birding Trail on the statewide website that I’ve set up: for the Alabama Birding Trails project: www.alabamabirdingtrails.com. It isn’t fully developed yet, but you can read about each of the sites, see photos for many of them and find all of them via gps mapping. What a great project! (Snapshot of the website below)
My brother-in-law, Billy Milstead, retired several years ago. Since then, he’s developed a real passion for all things Southwest Alabama. He’s got a real interest in documenting all the historic places in the area–of which there are many, many, many. He worked on the Alabama’s Front Porches project for a year, traveling the roads and taking photos as a AmeriCorps Vista volunteer. After he finished that project, he wanted to do more. I’ve now built him a website (Rural Southwest Alabama) to hold all these photos, maps and descriptions in a way that lets people from the outside world explore what the rural Black Belt has to offer.
Recently finished a new website for my long-time friends at CAWACO RC&D. They were one of my very first clients, and I’ve been working with them for about 11 years now. Great folks. Great projects. One of the great things about working with WordPress websites is the ability to completely change the look and functionality of a site without having the do much of anything with the content. A few tweaks of some tags, changing a few photos around and bang: a new look to a site that really needed a refresh!
One of the monthly newsletters I work on: The Alabama Sierran. I did the first newsletter for the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club in January 2006 and have done one each month since then. This is an 8 page tabloid-size newsletter printed on recycled newsprint. You can download the full newsletter at alabama.sierraclub.org. In addition to working on this newsletter, I just finished an online newsletter for Birmingham, Alabama based CGH Insurance Group (www.cghinsurance.com/newsletter). And, perhaps most fun right now, I’m working on a website on tourism–particularly historical and ecological–in Bibb County, Alabama. I’m developing it almost entirely in Movable Type (using a little Dreamweaver to help me handle the CSS stylesheets). Pretty interesting stuff. Not that far along yet, but I’ve built the shell: www.bibbtourism.com. Other than that, just the usual blog updates at Your Town Alabama and Alabama’s Front Porches.