wyhaines
May 6, 2005, 1:30 PM
Post #10 of 10
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Re: ["El Gringo Jalapeño"] Crime in the Xapala area
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Yeah. Tamara and I talked for an hour a couple weeks ago, and she said that she had done your site for you. She did a good job on the art and the colors.
One thing that *I* think is important when one is trying to get a feel for a place are pictures. I'm not talking about pictures of the waterfall at Texolo or things like that, though they are useful, but pictures of everyday places and everyday life.
Tamara's blog actually has the _best_ set of these that I have found anywhere, though I found one other site that gives one some 360 degree quicktime based views of a few areas in Xalapa. That is a neat technology.
I'd love to see a good, and really extensive collection of pictures put together of Xalapa and of Veracruz in general. Real pictures of real life in the different areas.
And then combine those real pictures with either links to other sites that contain information relevant to the areas, or with small or large writing to elaborate on some of them.
For instance, I found an article online written about a fellow from New York who is living in Xalapa and started a gourmet cupcake business. In fact, I could be wrong, but I believe he rents from you, right?
The article was great, but the words alone failed to give a really good picture of what it means to his life to be selling gourmet cupcakes in Xalapa. Combine a writeup on his interesting story with _real_ pictures of where he lives, where he works, the streets, people, etc..., and it'd be an really good article instead of merely an, "Oh, that's different and kind of interesting." sort of thing. With the internet one doesn't have the same sort of constraints that one does when doing articles for print media, and that isn't taken advantage of enough, in my opinion, or it's taken advantage of simply to provide fluff without the content.
That actually seems to be a very common phenomenon on Mexican web sites, for some reason. MANY of them are visually very slick, employing professional photos and graphics and eye catching effects. But that's it. Little or no actual information. Little or no actual real-life anything. (And never mind the broken software issues)
I'd love to see a site with information about Xalapa, Veracruz, or even Mexico in general that flies in the face of this.
Words and information are great for an intellectual understanding of something, but short of an in-person visit, pictures are what sell it, and given the proliferation of digital camera technology, and the relatively small amount of space good web quality pictures take up, compared to how cheap it is to put them online, it seems like a winning combination that, most of the time, just is not well leveraged.
It's funny. Almost all of the web sites and software that I do are for businesses, and the majority of that is for financial companies (banks, mutual funds). They tend to be very conservative with regard to how they want a site to look, but even there, where SEC regulations permit it, a few pictures adds a great deal to a site's presence. It's one thing to be reading fairly dry information on a mutual fund company based in Milwaukee, but quite another when each of the pages has a different image of a slice of Milwaukee.
Or when a link to find out information on the fund manager's qualifications is accompanied by a good picture or two about the manager(s). It gives a sense of connection. Or if a construction company's fairly dry reports on roof conditions of industrial buildings in Wisconsin and Chicago are accompanied by real pictures taken yesterday of those roofs. Pictures sell things so much more than do words.
Okay, long post. Back to work for me. :)
Thanks,
Kirk Haines
P.S. since it sounds like you have good internet connectivity, have you ever thought about setting up a web cam looking out a window or down on your street or something? In the US, a cam can be had for $40USD or less, and it's trivial to setup something to push a jpg from the camera up to a web site once a minute, or five minutes, or whatever interval seems reasonable. Even with Mexico's higher prices for tech items, I imagine that it'd be inexpensive to do this.
Of course, whether that's interesting or not, I think depends on what the view is outside of your place. :)
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