Welcome to Your New Website!!

Dear beloved and adored Coalition members,

Welcome to YOUR WEBSITE!!!  We made this for you because we love you and want you to have pretty, functional, easy to update things, and because we want you to be able to communicate your EXTRAORDINARY AWESOMENESS to the great wide world with ease.

This website is made on WordPress, which means that YOU, yes YOU, can update it YOURSELF.  You can update all of the pages, including (ride leaders) details about your rides and (trail-work leaders) details about your trail work sessions and (City and County advocates) details about what’s going on with SVBC’s great advocacy work.  The website is also a BLOG, which means that YOU, dear beloved SVBC members, CREATE THE CONTENT.  This website incorporates all the posts that have been made on SVBC’s trail work blog and SVBC’s advocacy blog (we’ll leave both of those blogs up, but no new posts will be made to them) as well as all the posts on the Friendly City Grand Prix (Tuesday night cyclocross) blog and the posts from Playing Outside in the Shenandoah Valley, Johnny Youngdahl and Roland Owen’s beautiful new blog.

So, lovely coalition members, here are your assignments, should you chose to accept them:

FIRST.  As you peruse your new website, you will find things that are WRONG.  Things will look funny in your browser, you will find information that is 10 years out of date, links will be broken, you will find that the lack of a mechanism to move between posts without returning to the homepage makes you want to claw your eyeballs out, and, egads, you may even find LIES.  All of these things are, of course, Kyle Lawrence’s fault.  But even so, you should please, please, PLEASE use the comment form in the footer to inform your Webmistress (that’s Jennifer) and her vastly superior sidekick (that’s Veerman) of what you have found.  The only way we can prioritize our list of things to fix is to find out the extent to which they are driving other people crazy.  Together, we can make this site almost as perfect as we are.  Or at least as perfect as Kyle is.

SECOND. Please, please, please, please, PARTICIPATE!! There are several ways you can do this:

1. By communicating to us what’s wrong (see above).
2. By communicating to us your fantastic ideas to make our website better.  (E.g., “please replace that picture of Kyle with a picture of Kari,” or “I am a web developer and you should be using these three plugins,” or “I am a graphic designer and I would love nothing more than to style your header.” Oh, please, please, please, style our header.)
3. By becoming an author.  A post can be as simple as a beautiful photo from your latest ride, a quote from a new bike commuter, or a quick note about what just happened at your Bike-Ped Subcommittee meeting or your County Board Meeting.  Once we get you up and running as an author, posting here will be as simple as posting to Facebook.  Email us or respond in the comment form and we’ll get you going!
4. By taking ownership of a page.  The pages are the things that are linked off the menus at the bottom of the header (which header you should please style).  (E.g., Mountain Biking, Road Biking, City Advocacy, County Advocacy, National Forest Advocacy, Events, Annual Events, etc.)  They are “static,” just like normal web pages.  The problem with static pages is, of course, that they get out of date.  If you would like to adopt one of these pages, we will love you forever, even more than we already do.  More importantly, you will be doing the Coalition a great service, and for all you quiet people people out there, you don’t even have to publish your name (but you can if you want!!!).  Email us, we will set you up as an admin, and together, we will rule the world.
5. By commenting on other people’s posts!  (Remember, never miss an opportunity to undermine Kyle’s self-confidence.)

With everlasting love and undying devotion,

Your Webmistress and her Vastly Superior Sidekick, Mark-Knows-A-Lot-But-Is-Really-Busy-Veerman,

p.s.  Huge thank-yous to Leighton Shank, who built us our prior site, which served the Coalition very well for years, and to Veerman, who, with brilliance and unsurpassed coding skills served for years as our website bottleneck.  Just kidding Veerman!  Thank you for your help, keep helping us forever!  Now the Coalition will have TWO website bottlenecks!  You can’t beat that.