Beach Cities Symphony and the World Wide Web
by Peter Landecker
In 1998, I decided to give BCS a web presence. The idea was to increase
publicity and communication channels, and possibly permit the orchestra to
grow. A few organizations similar to ours were starting to distribute
information about themselves on the World Wide Web, and I took the initiative
with our organization.
Geocities was offering free web sites, so I established an account with them as
http://www.geocities.com/beachcitiessymphony.
I notified various search engines that BCS existed. I requested links by
various web pages to include a link to BCS. Initially everything on the web
site was on a single index page. However, this homepage quickly became
unreasonably large, so I started to make links to supporting pages. I started a
separate list of orchestra members
http://beachcitiessymphony.org/Musicians.htm,
information about our conductor http://beachcitiessymphony.org/brisk.htm,
financial contributors http://beachcitiessymphony.org/contributors.htm,
advertisers
http://beachcitiessymphony.org/Advertisers.htm, a map http://beachcitiessymphony.org/Map.htm,
etc. I started sending out e-mail concert reminders and generated a web page
about this service http://beachcitiessymphony.org/ReminderBCSO.htm. I wrote
BCS page content code in HTML language by trial and lots of errors, since I was
never trained to use this computer code and that was what Geocities
required. Later I added electronic versions of our BCS Newsletter to the web
site
http://beachcitiessymphony.org/#Newsletters,
and started sending out e-mails that the Newsletter was available
electronically. The BCS newsletters sent by Toni Empringham's Mac to my PC
would look like gibberish, so Steve Fry did some translation for about a year.
The "reminder list" started to grow. I got and forwarded messages
from composers who wanted us to play their works, from musicians who wanted to
possibly join (several have subsequently joined) the orchestra, from
former friends of the Conductor and Orchestra Members who wanted to reestablish
contact. I added a link to Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/beachcitiessymph
(with the help of Jim Eninger) so BCS would get 5 per cent of any purchases. I
was sent photos from some concerts, and I posted them (see http://www.geocities.com/beachcitiessymphony/PhotosMay2000.html,
http://www.geocities.com/beachcitiessymphony/PhotosMay2001.html
and
http://www.geocities.com/beachcitiessymphony/PhotosMay2002.html).
I added a counter to keep track of the number of folks who accessed the home
page, at the suggestion of James Lee.
After about 3 years, the Geocities ads from the free website were getting
annoying to me, so I suggested that for a mere $18 per year we could get an
easier to remember and quicker to use web site address with no ads. I was
delighted when the BCS Board (led by Martin Wood) approved my request, and on
November 21, 2001, http://BeachCitiesSymphony.org
was born. I had to notify Webmasters of pages referencing ours of this change.
This new web site provider also permitted free e-mail relaying addresses, so I
set up that Barry Brisk would receive mail directly from conductor@BeachCitiesSymphony.org
and I would receive forwarded mail sent to peter@BeachCitiesSymphony.org .
The bonus for me is that I did not have to relay his messages any more. I
figured out a way in which someone accessing the old BCS Geocities web site
would be automatically and quickly transferred to the new Doteasy one without
any advertisements. I had to figure out how to go from updating the web site
pages using HTML and Geocities File Manger to Netscape Editor and an FTP
file transfer program.
As of November 2002, the BCS home page has been accessed about 12,000 times! In
the week just before a concert about 200 people access this page. In addition,
the other pages (newsletters, maps, photos, etc.) are also accessed. This
interest is much more than I originally anticipated!
The BCS reminder list has grown and was taking too much of my time to
administer. So in November 2002 (at the suggestion of Jim Eninger), I started a
free automated mailing list service provided by Yahoo. So if you want to
subscribe or know someone who does, all that is needed is e-mail to beachcitiessymphony-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
. If you try to subscribe and you already are subscribed, Yahoo will tell you
immediately. I still plan to send out 5-10 very short e-mail notices per year to
those on the reminder distribution list.
Several musicians mentioned that they joined BCS because they heard about us
from the web site. Rebate checks from Amazon.com come to BCS a couple of times
a year, as part of the web referral mechanism. There is one orchestra violinist
who buys most of the gifts for her grandchildren at Amazon through BCS
referral. Barry Brisk told me that a few people have approached him and told
him they knew all about him because of the biography I posted on the BCS web
site. I occasionally post obituaries and anniversary notices of key BCS
participants. Several current orchestra members said they joined BCS because of
the web site.
There were several folks who made helpful suggestions about improving the BCS
web site over the years, and I really appreciated this feedback. Recent web
contributions have been by Peter Coffee, Toni Empringham, Rebecca Rutkowski,
Margaret McWilliams, Robert Peterson and others. I still very much appreciate
e-mails or computer disks with material to add to the BCS web site.
In summary, the BCS web site has been in my opinion extremely successful, and
opened up communication channels that were never anticipated by me. The volume
of its use has pleasantly surprised me.
This page last updated November 26, 2002
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