Continuing on the Action Project

This past weekend I went to Valdese again to visit with the tourism director and laid out the ground work for what I would be doing next. We decided on the sites to include on the community walk and what to say about each. After that I went to the different historic sites around town and took as many photographs as possible to include on the website. It was a lot of fun to go and see all of the sites again. It has been many years since I had visited a few of them and it reminded why I was doing this project. I read an article the other day in the Morganton News Herald about how the population of Burke County has dropped nearly 1% just in the last 9 months due to people moving away to find work elsewhere. Barbara (the tourism director) is quite worried that many of these people were from Valdese in particularly because of this she is on the front lines trying to get alcohol voted in this election. This would be a great way for the growth of business opportunity in town. We both agree that with this project hopefully it will open the eyes of new visitors, people looking to move to town, or the greatest scenario would be a business. Maybe they will see how historically quaint the town is and decide this is the place to set up shop, I know it's a long shot.

Continuing on my project

Yesterday I officially started work on my project. I have created the map and registered Valdese, NC onto communitywalk.com. Now it is time to get information and pictures of all the different sites in Valdese and get them loaded to the website. I am really excited because just playing around with it yesterday I had a lot of fun. I have added a couple of sites that I already new a great deal about and it looks really good. It seems it is going to work out to be a great tool to help Valdese tourism. I am going to use the make a trail feature to create a loop that will take you through the town and all the way around the backside so no location is missed. The loop will end back where it began so the visitors will have no problem finding there way around.

Project is a go!

Went the other day to speak with the tourism board of Valdese and they were really excited about my project. Actually they were so impressed with my plan of creating a loop trail through the community they told me that they would link it up on the tourism website and their facebook page. I am really surprised how interested everyone was in the project! I makes me feel good that I am helping out my hometown. Now the pressure is on to create a good community walk and make it as professional as possible.