The plan - 2017

For those of you who have been following along, I'd like to point out a few new ideas and plans for 2017.  Some of them are ambitious.  Some of them may not happen. But I thought I'd let you know what I'm thinking:

• You may now sign up as a paid member, either as an individual ($10/year) or as a business or organization. At the moment the only perk for being a paid member is that most of the ads on the site will disappear for you when you are logged in. There will be more as the year rolls on.
• I am currently doing some work on site layout and design - things are fairly spartan at the moment, and I think you should be seeing at least some improvement in design over the next few months - but I'm concentrating at the moment on functionality over looks.
  
• Partnerships - I'm planning on using most of the first quarter of the year working on building partnerships. This will include partnerships with nonprofits (starting in the Chippewa Valley) and with alternative media across the state.  My hope is that we can involve more
• Roku Channel - I am doing some introductory work on building a Roku channel - this will be useful for alternative media producers around the state - the idea is that Community TV, Community Radio, and others would be able to produce content and add it in to the Roku channel - people could then watch and listen to the content on Roku boxes -- why Roku? Because it's the most common streaming box, and one of the easiest places to build a custom channel.  If I had to guess, I would say this will soft-launch some time around March.
• Training Tutorials - you should soon be seeing more on-line tutorials for the site, including more salient pop-up help on the site. There will also be some on-line training webinars coming up.