Committee reviews visit-clearlake.com demo; agrees to small content subcommittee

The Clear Lake Marketing Committee reviewed a prototype marketing website Michael (Speaker 7) built on Joomla and discussed how it could be used to promote Clear Lake to visitors and prospective residents.

Michael said the non-hyphenated visitclearlake.com is owned by a domain investor and that he secured visit-clearlake.com (with a hyphen) as a working demo. He showed a slideshow mockup organized around three themes — visit, move here and adventure — and described technical options such as embedding other organizations’ calendars or content via iframes and RSS feeds.

Committee members pressed on content and operations: several speakers said a consolidated events calendar would be valuable but warned that multiple organizations run calendars on different platforms, and that a named content manager is needed to keep shared data accurate. Members discussed tradeoffs between a single master calendar and an aggregated view that pulls in separate calendars by filter or iframe.

Michael asked for a small working group to pick photos and ad copy; the committee agreed two members could work with him and bring recommendations back to the full committee. The group also raised a possible revenue model of selling advertising on the site, and said they would consult legal and finance staff before pursuing paid placements.

Next steps assigned were: (1) Michael to meet with two committee members to scope content and images, (2) follow up on technical feasibility for calendar aggregation, and (3) report progress at the next meeting.