Latter-day Village Square

Last week, I checked out Amazon.com for their program called a-store. It is a way a website can feature Amazon.com products and earn a little commission on each sale. I set up a little store for Latter-day Village and started populating it with books. I worked on biographies to begin with. The program lets you hand pick what products will go in each category of your store. So I used two search parameters. First was books. Second I typed in keywords such as Mormon, LDS, latter-day saints, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Each time I got a HUGE list of books - 3,000 - 10,000 that matched that search criteria. I am not sure how they ordered the books, maybe by popularity. They weren’t in alphabetical order, that much I know.

Well, I will tell you, it was a wretched and wearying experience. More than half the books were anti-mormon. Soon I felt as though I was sludging through raw sewage to find the few books I might include in our store. I thought to myself, I would never want any of our visitors to be exposed to this awful experience. I really don’t know if I will ever finish the store - it was so disturbing to go through that.

Now, maybe this is not the least bit news-worthy to you - perhaps you are completely aware of the over arching sentiment in the world toward the church, but I frankly was quite ignorant of how pervasive it was. And I knew that the destructive force of so much hatred had taken it’s toll, and IS and WILL take it’s toll on the souls of many. I have friends who have succumbed to this influence. It is really upsetting.

So what should I do? Not about the bookstore, just about this new realization. I decided that though we are only a small voice, the website is a light in the darkness. I don’t suppose many non-members come to latter-dayvillage.com, but if we somehow help members be stronger, then it is an important work. That is what I hope we do. Feeling you can fill your calling well is an important part of maintaining spiritual health. Also, contributing to a community is important. We have lots of opportunities at LDV for people to do that.

At any rate, I just want to say that I know God lives. I know Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer. I know the Atonement is real. I know that Joseph Smith was a true prophet and restored the fullness of the gospel to the earth. I know the Book of Mormon is the word of God. I know Gordon B. Hinckley is a prophet. I belong to the true church of Jesus Christ. I am grateful for faith. I realize not everyone has an easy time with faith. My faith has always come easily. And so I am really thankful for that blessing.

And I am grateful for the work I am able to do each day on this website.

Sincerely,
Debra

Tonight we switched our link management system. Our old choice was really outdated and suffered from lack of good updates and fixes. Sometimes that’s the way it is with free (open source) software. We upgraded to a commercial scheme that makes it easier for us to add and maintain all of the links we list.

Our LDS links have a two-fold purpose:

1. Provide our members with access to other internet resources that can help with their church callings or family life.
2. Give us a mechanism to expand and encourage other sites to exchange links with us. This drives more traffic to our site; which in turn allows us to continue to improve what we offer.

This upgrade helps with both aspects. The links are easier to navigate and also now include a small snapshot image of the site. You can quickly see if the site is a place you want to visit. We also feel that the simpler layout is less confusing than what you may have seen previously.

Finally, our system helps us reach out to link partners and exchange information with them. This then increases our presence in the search engines, allowing more latter-day saints to find and use our resources.

Thanks for listening.

Have you ever called a customer service line and heard the message “Please note that our menus have changed…”? Well tonight we changed our Latter-dayvillage.com menus. Here are the major changes.

• Changed the main entry ‘Inservice’ to ‘Resources’. Feedback and research told us that only long-time church members still associate the term ‘Inservice’ with training and resources, so we decided to choose a more recognizable word. Perhaps we will have to do less explaining with this simple fix.
• Added menu items for our Village Download Depot Club, in both the Resources and Leisure categories. We are very proud of this new concept, a monthly collection of LDS oriented, downloadable clipart, and want to make sure everyone can find information about it. We also want VDD club subscribers to have an easy path to get to their downloads.
• Fixed some bad menu links. There were no really broken links, just some better page choices.
• Pointed the What’s New menu to this blog.
• Update the LDS links menu entries to point to the new links pages.

We hope these changes help our members and subscribers.

Alvina Kwong, who designed our Village Download Depot logo of the train pulling into the train station, is the featured artist for our Valentines Collection - and what fun, playful designs she has provided this season!  Melissa Carter is the pen behind our cute 2007 Primary Theme Collection - which you don’t want to miss!

And to make February a great great month to subscribe to the Download Depot CLUB - we have kept our January Collections online - so you are getting FOUR wonderful collections and FOUR beautiful fonts for only $7.95!!!  It is a STEAL!

I’ve been having fun adding some EXTRAS too - I bought some conversation heart candy and with my trusty scanner and marvelous Photoshop!  Viola!  We now have 20 exclusive LDS Conversation Heart Candies!  Well, you can’t eat them, but, doggone if they don’t look like you could - and the phrases I added are ones you will never find in a mountain of conversation hearts you might purchase at the store!  Drag and drop the images into any document - make up games, choose and review cards - or your very own LDS valentines!  They are just so fun!

I have added a sample from each of the four collections to the Club Sampler as special projects - too.

I’ve already gotten some of the art for the March Collections - and it is really beautiful!

Debra

Actually, I got a message from HP early in January recapping their year, and one of the most popular downloads they had was this calendar you could customize and print out. As I looked at it, I thought, WOW! We need to do an LDS Calendar - the wheels started spinning in my head and I approached the artists who are designing the Club Collections to see if they would be willing to donate some art to use in a 2007 Calendar. I got some quick feedback of wonderful designs, and I quickly got busy formatting the calendar - doing a lot of research to put interesting dates in - the birthdays of our current general authorities, church holidays, events and historic anniversaries. In the process, I used WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Photoshop and I was MORE than THRILLED with the results of combining the art with the calendar design.

The idea is, we have some very talented artists designing for us. We have a fabulous website - the resources we’ve been developing for years along with the new ones we keep adding - they really are tremendous, and people need to know about them. We are doing a lot of things to increase our visibility on the web, but with 8000 subscribers - we know we are only scratching the surface of latter-day saints online around the world - so we are offering this wonderful calendar as an incentive for our members to take a moment and help spread the news.

Anyone who refers a friend to LDV - who then subscribes to any of our paid subscriptions, will get access to download this beautiful calendar - along with the person they referred! Even if you refer yourself! That’s fine. There is a box to fill in during registration to identify who told you about LDV - an email address is useful, and all we need to send our thank you to them.

The really cool thing about these calendars is you can print as many as you need for your own personal or church use.

And of course, once you see this artwork, you will understand the value of the Download Depot Club. These designs are so great, and these artists just keep sending me the most wonderful art collections for the Club!

Tell everyone you know about LDV - it is time to STOP keeping it a secret!

Debra