Northwest Navy News Update
Northwest Navy News is a project by NMWE winners Elaine Helm Norton. Though the site has not launched yet, Norton has provided a comprehensive update on her progress.
By Elaine Helm Norton
I have spent much of my time during this first phase of the project doing research and connecting with people in the Northwest’s Navy community. I gained valuable ideas and perspectives from two primary groups: the USS Momsen family readiness group—women whose husbands serve on a destroyer based in Everett—and people who attended the Kitsap Military Fall Festival, an event sponsored by the Silverdale Chamber of Commerce. The women from the Momsen group talked about how they connected with services and information when they moved to the area. Many of them relied on family or friends. Some used social networking sites, such as Meetup.com or MySpace.com, to find other Navy wives in the area. Others relied entirely on the Navy. I found similar trends in a voluntary survey of 28 people who stopped by my booth at the Kitsap Military Fall Festival. About two-thirds of the survey respondents said their primary source of news and information about the military was the Navy—either the base newspaper or their chain of command. In addition to providing valuable information about their habits, about 30 people from these two groups have agreed to be beta testers for Northwest Navy News.
As I went out to talk to people about my project, I wanted to have a logo to use that would represent the character of the site. I used a site called crowdSPRING to solicit logo ideas from designers and chose one that I think conveys the site’s social and family emphasis. I had the logo ready by the time I attended the Kitsap Military Fall Festival and made some business cards with it that I use now whenever I introduce the project to someone new.
I recently began developing content and mapping out the structure of the site. I hired two freelance journalists with a connection to the Navy to write profiles of towns that support local Navy bases. Marietta Nelson-Bittle is a former reporter for the Kitsap Sun whose husband is a commander assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln. Scott Whitmore is a part-time copy editor and writer for The Herald in Everett. He retired as a lieutenant commander after a 20-year career in the Navy, which he began as an enlisted submariner. Marietta will focus on the west side of Puget Sound and Scott will focus on the east side. Their community profiles, including a list of frequently asked questions and answers for military families relocating to the area, will form the backbone of “landing pages” for those communities. I envision the profiles as collections of resources that will grow and change with input from the site’s users.
I also started a Twitter account and began feeding it with items I see in various publications that relate to the military in the Northwest. I’m not just aggregating news from other sources, but I’m trying to select articles and links from around the Web that would be of interest to my target audience for Northwest Navy News. I’d like to start building an audience for this Twitter account in advance of my site’s beta launch.
I plan to meet with a Web developer to begin building and designing the first version of the site. I decided to build the site with Drupal, an open-source content management system with a vibrant development community. I’ll be working with Bear Ideas, a Drupal development firm in Seattle. The first iteration of the site likely will include the community profiles, forums, user profiles and a blog. The developer probably will begin with an existing Drupal theme of my choosing (like this or this) and then customize it. This will allow me to launch fairly quickly and begin building a community of users while I spend more time with the developer on the searchable databases I outlined in my application. I’ve already done some work mapping out on paper how different users would navigate and interact with the site, which will make the development process go more smoothly.
I won’t have an exact timeline until after I meet with the developer, but I’d like to launch the first version of the site early in 2009 and have the second version ready to go by May. It would be ideal to time the official launch for Armed Forces Day, May 16, 2009, so I could organize a kickoff event in conjunction with local celebrations. It will be exciting to watch all the pieces come together and to see how people react to the site when it becomes more than just a collection of ideas.
