Not Reinventing the Wheel...

We're still in the early stages of our project to build a website to help the Worldwide Community of people with an interest in Mayo together...

But, one of the things we keep coming back to in our design discussions is what kind of a website do we want to create that will be the most useful to the most number of people?

We identified about a dozen groups of people ("audiences") that we would like to have using our website.  Without boring everyone to death...they essentially come down to:

• People living in Mayo
• People interested in keeping up with what's happening in Mayo, but living outside the county
• People who may want to visit Mayo (as general visitors or who have special interests like walking, kayaking, surfing, etc.)
• People whose ancestors came from Mayo

To meet the general goal of the website (of connecting people), we've decided to offer a range of social networking options (post your profile, make friends, form groups, discussion boards, etc.).

In addition, we've decided to have most of the site content in Wiki format.  Basically, our idea is to create pages for all of the towns and villages of Mayo and work with local community members to try and put up information about all of these areas.  Since it will be a Wiki, anyone with information will be able to add what they know to it.

Over time, we'd hope to develop an extensive living encyclopedia about all things Mayo.  Personally, I'm hoping that the site members keep a real spirit of fun to the listing.  I think it would be great to have things such as ghost stories, local legends and folklore and the like included as well as what you'd expect to see such as information about favourite sons and daughters like Michael Davitt.

As the title of this post says, "Not Reinventing the Wheel" is our goal.  There's no point in putting up a bit of information on a topic that is much better dealt with on a specialist website elsewhere.  But, we do want to be as useful to as many people as possible.

Some ideas we'd like to explore deeper are:  genealogy (could we have a county-wide "family tree" shared by everyone?), area pages that combine information for Irish communities in places such as Cleveland, Ohio, USA with news and events from County Mayo and shopping (how can we best sell or help market Mayo products worldwide?)...

As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.

Thanks for reading!

Rick Love