Podcast: What you will not see at Conway Scene

00:00.00
tejones
Hey, everyone welcome to the weekly podcast by Conway scene I’m your host Todd Jones and today we’re gonna do something a little bit different I am still looking for people to interview. Got some tentative. Folks that havetively agreed to do that so we’ll be working on those as we come, but this was gonna be more of a solo podcast and so the first thing I want talk about is the new um person or new company who’s sponsoring the calendar our community. Calendar at conway scene is real important to me to try to have the most robust calendar available so in doing so I take advantage of some software that helps to. But still take that and to help phrase over to offset some of those expenses we have a community calendar sponsor haynes ace hardware store and Conway has agreed to do that for the rest of year and I’m pretty excited about that. So when you’re on the counter page. You’ll see their logo at the top and the bottom as well as on each and every counter of event and we have some other things that works with them I’ll let you know more about that as the time comes, but. Really really trying to work on getting as many things on the calendar as possible and that takes work. It takes some like I said some help from a software standpoint and also of course. You as an organization that have has some kind of public open to everybody top of event can actually put that on the counter as well. You can submit that there’s a place to submit your request on the counter page actually and if you. Look at the navigation menu and below the calendar. There’s a submenu called submit events and at the bottom there’s ah of the calendar page. There’s a link to submit your event and many people have already taken advantage of that. In fact, some of the issue some of the events going on this week toward the end of the week was submitted by people. Including the first annual CA Fc fishing rodeo and Derby that one was submitted by someone and the unseen campaign which will be I think concluding this weekend or yeah.

02:40.85
tejones
Well the March which is Saturday morning that was also submitted by the city of hope outreach. So some of these companies. Some organizations are actually submitting their event and others I go out and look for so you don’t have to wait on me to hopefully find your event you can actually submit it. I do tell people to give me about 48 hours to approve and publish the event. So. In other words, if your events tomorrow. It’s probably gonna be too late to get it on the calendar. We do try to feature at least a couple events in the newsletter every Monday morning. So. You know, just as a kind of teaser you get people to go to the calendar to see what else is going on so I’m working through that trying to make that a more robust calendar tracking things down when I see something on Facebook when somebody invites me I usually hit interest and try to go back and. Put that on the calendar but it doesn’t always happen. So again, you don’t have to wait on me but I would say this if you are going to submit something you might check the calendar first to make sure that it’s not already added if it’s not already added then go ahead and add it and if you want to ping me. On Facebook or whatever you can say hey Todd I submitted an event you know I just want you to let you know and I’ll try to get in there and and make that I have to do some some things that’s unique with the calendar including tagging it and put it in the right category fuel things like that which don’t take very long but between. Noticing it and going in and doing that usually at night I will sit down and go through emails and make sure that I haven’t missed anything so again, thanks to Ace Hardware who has stepped up to help with that. I expect to have more of these kinds of sponsorships moving forward. We’re looking at that I actually have a price list so that’s something that if you’re interested in as a business owner you can let me know and I’ll get you that priceless have a new article up as of today. We’ve. We posted some uca events as well. That comes from the uca a Pr department but we have a new business profile which is the chu station now this the owner is Kate Huffman and this particular business is actually in our directory. All the feature ah business profiles we do are people or companies that we have in our directory. So if you are in the directory we we will eventually get to if you’re not and you want to submit let me know we’ll get that in there and eventually we try to do one a month.

05:26.18
tejones
Just to kind of get people to know about the company and um, so this month we have the che-choo station which is a pet sitting and dog walking service and that is an ah important service for many of us because we have our pets our furry friends as I call them. And I absolutely love cats and dogs and I love seeing your pictures of them online and if you’ve got a cat I will probably try to pet the cat because I love cats anyway. So this one is about the chooo station and you can. Ask the the standard questions and you can answer her ah you can see her answers in the article on the website. So the chechoo station and they again the owner is Kate Tumpin so if you have a chance youd go ahead and take a look at that and we’ll. I’ll be doing no next one? Um, so I’m sorry to wind down just a little bit is again. This is a quick podcast but 1 thing I wanted to address is why I don’t use pop-up ads there’s a number of reasons actually but think about the last time you went to maybe a larger media website. And you found that it was very slow loading. There’s nothing worse than waiting 15 seconds for everything to load or some kind of ad video immediately turning on when you get there and you don’t even know where it’s coming from. It really hurts the experience and on top of that as someone who keeps up with a little bit with how Google does things they actually don’t like to reward websites that use these big pop-up ads so that supposedly they don’t. Um, but anyway it’s a frustrating thing so what happens when a website does that is they’re loading scripts very various scripts um to to probably check analytics which we use as a web developer. We’ll use scripts to do that. Usually he’s Google analytics but there are other ones out there and then they probably have some kind of ad system that they use where they plug the ads in and they’re going for mass traffic so they can get eyeballs lots eyeballs on those ads and hopefully get a click out of it. I’m not sure if they’re getting paid by the clicks or just by the view. But regardless, that’s one of the reasons you have these massive ads and this is one of their primary ways of making revenue and sir. But I think personally that it leads to a very bad experience. I abhor.

08:19.51
tejones
Going on media websites and because of that and it’s sad because some of them are local Tv stations which I actually like and I want to go on the website and read the article but I’m bombarded with all this stuff and this slow load and it just drives me nuts and. Just did not want to do that for conway scene. Um, um, you know I’m fine trying to to build revenue and and make some you know revenue off of the website but I don’t want to do it at the expense of you who is coming to my website I don’t want you to get some kind of. Video ad popping up and starting that you didn’t ask for some huge ad taking over the whole screen just didn’t want to do that. So I built it slowly because of that trying to generate awareness for the website and those kinds of things and I just you know. And didn’t want to do it by doing these intrusive ads and so that’s one of the reasons I don’t use pop-up ads the other thing is I’m really looking to use the site to help local businesses as opposed to. Some big company corporation in another state. That’s not to say that you know they’re not important but I would rather be helping ace hardware or blue barn bakery or someone like that you know a local company who is trying to. Do something for the community build a legacy those kinds of things so that is another reason I don’t really do much with those kind of pop-up ads and just don’t want to do it. It’s a bad user experience for you. Guys. So. That’s just something I thought might explain to you if you were interested to know and so I really do hope that you are enjoying conway scene and that it helps you in some way we’ve had a couple of writers this spring. From the University Of Central Arkansas the Pr department shout out to Dr Riva Brown who has helped me connect to those students and they’ve done a great job so far and hopefully we’ll have some more and hopefully you’re enjoying those articles those stories. 1 of the articles that came out recently was about Rachel Lovelace who is a a local business owner who she makes various types of um.

11:06.46
tejones
Fashionable like custom bags and those kind of things. So really interesting story to hear about where this idea came from. Um so I would encourage you to go read that article at the website and read this one actually was written by Raven Nobles and so check that out when you have a chance and thanks for joining this week and we’ll be back next week with another episode of the weekly podcast.