Dear Hon Secretary/President

Thanks for the link to the latest Munities (I also read the minutes at the same location <g>).

 A couple of comments:

 I noted the statement under General Business – NEWSLETTER “We are going to apply for the grant that is offered by the council for printing and will stick within their guidelines for no advertising and talking about them.”

This seems to indicate that the Council have a condition in their support that they not be mentioned in the newsletter, or is that they are just not to be criticised? If the latter surely that should not be acceptable to the Association.  If a situation arises that the council should be criticised then so be it, but the Association should not accept any restraint on such behaviour. If I have misread the comment I would appreciate clarification.

May I also support the comments under Feedback, on the web site, made by Peter Thompson re Aldi not consenting to providing easy parking access for the pharmacy. Aldi spent a lot of money to provide parking for their own premises and should not be criticised for not providing public parking for their retail neighbours.

May I also suggest you pursue savings to be made by asking Association members whether they would be happy to receive all communications via email and web links (unless this has already been done).

A couple of comments on the Association web site:

Firstly the Association is to be commended for raising and maintaining a web site to increase communication about local matters to the membership. Your web designer has done a good job and any comments I have added below are only intended to be constructively critical.

The link to Gosford City Council is not active. I assume that the inactive links under the History and Photos sections simply indicate that more will follow in those areas in due course.

In other parts of the web site you do have active links which are not obvious. May I suggest that you discuss with your web designer the possibility that active links be made obvious by colour or underlining to save page viewers from having to mouse around to find active links.

Your “Contact Us” page uses a form to be completed rather than simply supplying one, or more, email addresses to be clicked on, thus allowing the sender to compose a message in their own email program.  A correspondent using their own email program has the advantage of both easy spell checking and retention of a copy of the email sent. Neither alternative is readily available to someone using an online form. I pass this comment on as one whose business has involved using the Net since it became available to we mere mortals. I hate online forms and Captcha security requirements! I suggest there is little or no need to inflict a Security Code on a potential correspondent. Displayed email addresses can easily be coded by your web designer in way they cannot be harvested by web bots.

I also note that I have provided a link to the Association web site in the Links section of one of our own web sites – www.tascott.com.au

Perhaps the Association could also use its own site Links page to allow members to provide a simple (one line) link to their own local business. Perhaps this could be on a reciprocal basis, although our link through tascott.com.au is not conditioned on any such reciprocity but rather because of the geographic aspect.

I am also intrigued by the site banner header. What is the location shown in the aerial photo, as I’m unable to see a connection with the Progress Association area? I also have some difficulty in interpreting the logo displayed as it seems like a flooded wigwam with three square windows, though I’m sure that’s not correct. Is there a design interpretation worthy of mention as I have some difficulty in seeing the value it adds to the site?

Please feel free to reproduce all or any part of this correspondence in the Feedback section of your web site.

Best wishes

Kate and Peter McDonell

Victory Parade, Tascott NSW 2250

kate@tascott.com peter@tascott.com

kate@tascott.com.au peter@tascott.com.au