Hello, this is Frank, the Austin Pond Society Webmaster, and they asked me to do a brief
overview of the website for those of you that are not aware of all of its capabilities.
So let's see what we can get up to here.
If you open the site, which is at austinpondsociety.org, you'll come up with this main page, home
page, and it is made up of several different items.
If you can see my cursor, then it's pointed on the very top row, which says, call us with
questions, that is my number, if you call it first, then I can direct you to where you
want to be.
This might find us on a map, it's for anybody that doesn't know where Zilker Botanical
Gardens are, and then of course here's an email address, which is mine, that if you
want to contact me by email, you certainly can do that.
As you drop down onto the page itself, you'll see there's a whole bunch of different links
here that have drop down menus or not, whichever the case may be.
The menus can be a bit of a pain as they sometimes come on when you don't want them to, but you
just move your cursor back up to this open space and they will go away.
The first thing that comes up is the home page, I'll click on that to get you started
here.
This is the home page, and the picture here is the monthly winner of our photo contest.
It gets changed on a monthly basis, this particular one named here, January Calendar Picture by
Darren Bayhee.
This little blurb advertises the fact that the Austin Pond Society annual pond tour is
June 3rd and 4th.
The way we have this set up is on the right is a menu of all the current recent posts,
and the two of the most recent ones are the out gone board members and the current board
members.
As you continue scrolling down there, there's archives and categories, and you can contact
us through another same link, and then here is our Facebook page, a link to it shows what's
currently up on the current Facebook page, it stays pretty current all the time.
Going back to the top, we try to make this interesting, and there's a little picture
here, but it says, do you need fish?
We do a lot of fish rescues, and Genie's got some fish available for anybody that wants
them as long as you remember, and you can contact her by this link here.
Do you want to join it?
Do you know somebody that wants to join?
You click on this picture, and it will take you to the forms necessary to join.
We have a pretty extensive library as well, and we have a new librarian with Margaret
Bonecki taking it over.
She has the job of lugging heavy credit books around.
If you click on that link, this shows you what is actually available, all the different
books and things that we have out there, and it's a good library in the sense that it's
free, and there's no time limit on when you turn the books back in, you just need to turn
them back in, or renew them, whichever the case may be.
Do you need pond plants?
Well, as it happens, I've got a whole bunch of them that I'm trying to give away before
they end up on the compost heap, which is such a shame, because they're all beautiful plants
and none of them should end up there, but there are too many for me.
As we go down, there's a little blurb here about the general membership meeting dates,
followed by the meeting date itself, and then who the speaker is on that particular date.
As soon as we pass this month, there will be a link here to the blog that I write every
month about each of the meetings, so there will be a link to the blog, and there will
be a link on the right-hand side as well as it posted, and here's the next one February
the 20th.
Going down here, this is a new pond vac that we have available for membership.
If you click on that link, it takes you to the rental equipment as it's called, new
pond vac, and then we have a tank, I think it's 120 gallons, that you can rent as well.
So if you've got to move your fish for some reason or another, this tank is a big one
and you can keep it in storage, keep your fishing storage while you're operating on
your pond.
Maybe you can rent the two together, clean the pond out and put the fish in the tank
and use the pond vac at the same time.
Going back to the main page here, the three categories here, this one's shop, I'll click
on it but it may take a little while to load, and here it is, join the pond society or you
want to become a sponsor, and later on in the year there will be the ability to purchase
pond tour tickets that will be up here as well.
And then from the shop you go to the cart and then eventually you have a checkout.
A checkout by the way is very useful in the sense that you can utilize two different ways
of paying for your tickets or for your membership, either through PayPal or if you don't have
a PayPal account, through the same PayPal you can use a credit card in order to pay for
your goods.
Some of the forms allow you to fill them in and bring them to the meeting and pay at
the meeting where you can use a credit card as well or you can mail them in and the addresses
are always supplied.
This one, membership info and forms is just as it says.
The membership info and forms has several different forms up here.
This one is the meeting schedule which is one we've already talked about.
Here you can join the APS and the forms for that.
The rental equipment is advertised here, pond tour application form in case you want to
put your pond on the tour and then of course a link to the library.
The next one over is sponsors.
Notice that I don't click on the actual menu headers but to the drop downs themselves.
If I click on this it will take me to an archive so I don't want to go there.
So if I want to look at the sponsors I click on sponsors and all of these are current sponsors
from last year and they will hopefully all be renewing and we can keep their information
up there otherwise I will need to change that but you can contact any of these sponsors
through these links either up here which are alive or if you want to go to the link below
the card you can do it that way or there's usually phone numbers as well and we encourage
our members to utilize the sponsors as much as possible.
This one is if you want to become a sponsor which is $200 a year and then the benefits
of becoming a sponsor.
This is the new item that we have up there called the marketplace.
It's new this year only been up there for a couple months and the idea is if any of the
members have got items that they want to swap or sell or give away then they can advertise
them here and this is the blurb about the marketplace and this is the actual items that
we've currently got up there for sale or for swap.
A word of caution because we do so many fish rescues it's usually not even worth the bother
to try to sell fish you certainly put them up there to give them away but certainly not
to sell them because we have so many free ones and the same is true with pond plants
that we give away so many pond plants through various links people giving them away or people
closing down their ponds or like me got too many of them don't want to do with them and
you can't sell those either plus we have our own plants swap meeting which is very well
attended and people get rid of a lot of stuff there so we're really it's not worthwhile
not trying to sell pond plants or fish and the object is of course with the marketplace
that you've got a lot of gear that you want to sell pond gear pumps or skimmers or stuff
like that that you might want to be getting rid of and that's the place for the marketplace
not to say that you can't put the fish in the pond the plants up there certainly you
can but like I say it's not worth trying to sell them you can give them away.
Over here we have the board so if we click on the board it shows us who the current membership
is on the board a pretty picture followed by a whole bunch more pretty pictures board
members for 2017 some are continuing all these three are and this is a new one Jack
Marshall is a new one Stephen Montfreny is the most popular board member that we have
because he's in charge of hospitality and he feeds us every meeting.
Glyn Huberthal is the oldest member on the board currently been here for years and years
and years Rodney Lewis is a new membership and me of course and then Barbara Lenhart
is programs and she's the one that gets all the speakers and things she's not new she
was here last year Margaret Banecki is a new librarian and then Ellen Filtness is a publicity
person for this year and I want to welcome these board members and thanks very much
for volunteering.
The link over to the right are the bylaws for the pond society and the link at the bottom
down here is the description of the positions in case you're interested.
Moving along to the pond care and tricks here this one these are all the different blogs
that we've had up there concerning different things that we've done like cleaning out the
Willie Byrd board, Byrd's memorial pond which is the one out front and other people contributed
different stuff so this has got some great tips and tricks that you can use.
Over here is archive posts and there's a whole bunch of archive posts out here and eventually
I'll have to start taking them down and running out of room and from archive posts we go to
archive meetings and there's some great pictures in there of the past two years pond tours
and a lot of beautiful ponds out there for you to take a look at.
This pretty much closes out the overview of the website and going back to the main page
which is where we're off to there and trucking on down we didn't talk about this but trucking
on down not only are the blogs and postings on the right of the page they're also down
here with used a little picture or something just to brighten things up like three meetings
these are the outgoing board members and the current board members in three meetings and
in the marketplace when I put that up and that's just about it.
These of course change every time a new one comes up it goes here and the old ones drop
off the bottom end which is also true of this list here.
If you've got any questions or if you've got some concerns or ideas, suggestions then
you can see me after the meeting or during the meeting and we can talk about it.
Thanks, enjoy it.
