Your trusted source for community news
Dear Neighbors,
Thank you for being our first loyal subscribers. We appreciate how many of you open and read the articles that we send you every second and fourth Sundays of the month. We work hard to bring you community news that you can trust.
We are so excited to introduce you to our new website design. Because of those who financially support us, we were able to hire a company that specializes in designing newspaper websites to redesign and host our website. It went live with the July 23 issue, and we have slowly been learning how to use its features and finding the issues that need worked out.
Currently, our calendar is live. We’ve been busy writing and posting stories instead of collecting all the events (and there are A LOT) happening in Farmers Branch and training our kids to put them in the database. However, the new function means that others can easily help us, and already the Farmers Branch Police Department, the McLaughlin Strickland Elementary School PTA and the RLT Football Boosters have created accounts and started inputting their events.
Our goal is to have the best, most complete calendar of Farmers Branch events, and it’s going to be a team activity. If you know of activities or an organization that has events they can add, please show them the Submit Event link on the EVENT button in the navigation bar.
We’re still perfecting the business directory and RESTAURANT GUIDE (Yay!). That seems to require some code to be rewritten. We also have classified ads on the way, including ads with maps for garage sales, since Farmers Branch doesn’t allow signs. Announcements and obituaries are available now too. We also have a place for community content (YOUR PHOTOS and stories) too.
We still aren’t doing opinions, letters, editorials or comments because we don’t have the manpower to enforce rules about decency, slander and common courtesy. Everything that anyone submits in any way, we approve before it goes live on our site.
Be patient with us, but we highly recommend that you visit the site a couple times each week instead of depending on just our newsletter. We are starting to post stories on the website a couple times per week, and we think we’ll soon start sending the newsletter weekly. There’s a learning curve there as well. We are also considering how to create exclusive content just for our newsletter subscribers. Send us a message at news@branchherald.com if you have ideas about that. Our intent is to provide free community news, but it sounds like sports and special business news might be content that some people would be willing to pay extra for. We are considering that. Either one would mean we need to hire a special reporter.
Also, we are almost to 500 subscribers. Our goal is 10,000, and we know we’ll need to add Spanish and possibly audio before we hit that, but 20 percent of our population is our goal. Please let your friends, family and neighbors know that we are here. They can subscribe using the button at the top of the website. They do need to confirm their email address by clicking on the button in the email they receive.
Also, we are technically a for-profit corporation, so we are not a tax-deductible non-profit organization. But we can still receive your financial support, if you would like to give us a boost. And we will admit, receiving an email from the bank saying that we’ve received a deposit is shocking encouraging. The green support us button on the top right of the website makes it easy for you to support us.
Thank you for reading our stories, sending us emails of encouragement and feedback when we make mistakes.
We are glad you are our neighbor.
Best regards,
Kate, Erin, Michael & Spencer
