Clearlake committee debates central events site; member offers to prototype 'Visit Clear Lake'

Members of the Clearlake Marketing Committee discussed whether the city should host a centralized events and tourism site (described as Visit Clear Lake) or continue to rely on the existing Downtown Clear Lake pages and social feeds.

Michael McCue, a committee member, said a purpose-built three-part site — "why visit, why buy, events" — could be created quickly and could pull content from county partners and existing calendars. "You could port over a calendar from one of the many calendars into an iframe," he said, and proposed automating event creation with a digital submission form that would generate an event page once city staff approved the submission.

Members noted the practical limits of using the official city website: staff time to update pages is a bottleneck, and a Facebook-only presence performs poorly in search. Colleen, participating remotely, warned that a new Visit Clear Lake name could create confusion with an existing Visit Clear Lake Facebook page and the Downtown Clear Lake site and urged coordination to avoid search‑engine and branding confusion.

Discussion touched on cost and capacity: domain registration for clearlake.com was roughly estimated at $8–$12 a year, and Michael offered to prototype a site and suggested the committee could repurpose public-domain content from county partners. The committee asked Michael to prepare initial materials and imagery and to return with a prototype or a proposal at the next meeting. Members also agreed to provide content and to use the next meeting as a workshop to refine a target landing page for a prioritized event.

No binding decision was made; the committee described the next step as a follow-up workshop and directed members to submit graded event spreadsheets ahead of that session.