A reader's view: A postnet.com reader who chose to explore the community area directly would begin on the Gateway Page, below, and might either use the fairly conventional directories we provided or be led in unexpected directions by special features like the "20 Most Popular Web Sites," "Choose Your Causes" or the automatic teasers on our category pages, which would display a new, randomly chosen Web site from that category every 20 minutes (in the example below, the Salvation Army's). But readers could also be brought to individual Community Web Sites or specialized directories through hundreds of other links placed throughout postnet.com. A news story on, say, the Chinese religious group Falun Gong would typically have a link to the St. Louis-area Falun Gong group; in the books section of A&E, readers would find a directory of books-and-writing-related Community Web Sites; our calendar mixed events entered by Post-Dispatch staff with those entered by community groups directly, and included links to the groups' Web sites as well. (Going in the other direction, category pages in the community area included links to related news, entertainment and sports stories by Post-Dispatch writers.) We automated as much of this linking, event-entry and directory-making as we could so we would be able to serve up complete packages of news-and-events for readers on any topic at any time. Our community sites developed one of the largest reading audiences among our software-maker's clientele, more than 300,000 page views a month, mostly because the links we provided people were almost always to strong or at least actively maintained sites. | Next Page | Back to Resume
Which links on this page work? The link to
Helping Others & Self, in red below.
Disclosure: The page
below is a composite of the outer frame of the Feb. 1, 2000, Community Web
Sites Gateway and the principal content from June 15, 2001. For internal
corporate reasons that would remain mystifying even if explained, I wasn't
permitted to fully implement the plan for this page until early 2001; I've
retained the older frame here simply for visual continuity with other
pages in this set. Click here to see the original Feb. 1, 2000
page or June 15, 2001
page.
Go right to the source --
you'll find municipal governments, departments
and agencies here.
Are you an altruist without
a cause? Then come take a look at the big
projects some of our community groups are
involved in. There are plenty of places for you
to contribute your time, money and
passion.
Crowds have their reasons.
If you're curious which Community Web Sites the
hoi polloi, the mob and the multitude have been
going to see of late, look here. Just updated for May
2001.
