Art Walk in Hillsborough, NC

Smallwander.com is hosting it’s monthly teleconference this upcoming Monday, Nov 24, from 10 to 11 am.  The topic is “Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?

I particularly would like to explore why Hillsborough NC’s recent “Ladies Night Out” promotion was successful.  On a rainy Thursday night, hordes of women descended on the town and bought like crazy in the shops.  If you have similar stories about how special events translate to dollars in the shops, please think about them beforehand and share them with us.

Panelists will include Amy Wilmoth, a freelance marketing consultant for small businesses in the Triangle area of North Carolina, Elizabeth Read, Executive Director of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, Eddie Ide, President of Newton Merchants, Inc. of Newton North Carolina, and Greta Lint, tourism consultant.

We will be inviting town representatives in our smallwander network.  People will be able to either call in via telephone or listen in over the web.  They can also type questions to us.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

We have a new website design coming out.  So, what does that mean to you?  Well, the new design will enable our towns and travelers to enter their own stories directly from the website.  Smallwander staff will review the posts and approve them, keeping out the cranks.  This will allow us to get more good information about cool small towns up onto the site quicker.  So, there should be steadier stream of new towns added.  Plus, you’ll be getting more on-the-ground information from travelers and SW staff in addition to the party-line info from the smallwander PR machine.

Our site is being redesigned by Lisa Sabin-Wilson of E. Webscapes Design, and author of Wordpress for Dummies.  We have known we wanted to go to a more interactive, user-generated website for about a year, but it’s taken about that long to research what system to use, decide who would design it, and build the new site.  After deciding on going with a Wordpress platform, I was extremely thrilled to get Lisa on board, who literally wrote the book on designing Wordpress sites.  She has been great to work with, and we look forward to some great new functionality with the WP platform.  We thank Interactive Communications, Inc. for our current website, which did exactly what wanted during this intermediary year.

So, get ready to start sending us your stories, photos, and videos of the small, historic towns that you love.  Your fellow travelers want to hear about what you have to say.  Plus, we’ll be meeting with our towns to encourage them to provide more of the same.