I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season with many yummy mapley dishes. (Personally, my maple is too precious to waste much on cooking, but a little went in my pecan pie!)
I’m very grateful that most of the farms who participated in Maple Days last year have signed up! There’s still time. We will accept late registrations, though you might miss the boat on some advertising through WV Tourism and Department of Agriculture. But you will be on our website and on our map!
I went a little web-mastery this month and added two new sites that are attached to this one. The first is a Members Only site for dues-paying members. There isn’t much there right now, but we had a request for one at the annual meeting so we can have private content. One idea was that we could put up blue-prints for maple-equipment designed by members that they only want to share with other paying members. I also moved the Classified Ads there. No one has used them yet, but if it makes you feel any better, it will only be shared with members, because if you want to advertise to a broader audience you would just use Maple Trader. I think what will happen, if agreed at the next annual meeting, is that all dues-paying members will be added to the Members Only site. I’m taking suggestions as to what you would like to see on the Members Only Site. If you want to be added to it now, and contribute some ideas, email me at webmaster@wvmspa.org. If we deem it useful, this could be another perk of membership!
The second new sub-site I created was Maple in the Classroom. I talked with Kate Fotos, the classroom coordinator, and we decided it was better for her (and cleaner for us) to have her very own site that she can control. It doesn’t cost us any extra money to add a subdomain, though it is more work to maintain, so I’m glad Kate is going to learn how to do this too! In time, I will move the “Maple In the Classroom” menu item on the main site to “Resources”. I didn’t want to do it right away in case someone panics, thinking it was gone! If you click it, you will be put on the cool new site.
I’m working on adding a way for you to pay dues on the website. This could be very useful! The most basic, time-honored, way would be to create a PayPal account for WVMSPA. Some of you may already have a PayPal account for your business so that makes it super easy. A more complicated method is to allow members to use credit cards via PayPal, where someone with the PayPal log-in has to do some confusing steps to allow that (me, if you trust me). There are other more current things, like Stripe, Google Pay and Apple Pay. I just want to minimize what services have the WVMSPA account information, so I’m leaning toward Google Pay. The board will discuss this and maybe it will come up at the Annual Meeting in 2020.
More on all this later! Have a wonderful day!
Tina Barton, WVMSPA Webmaster