About Us and the Golden Snowball Website

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About Us and GoldenSnowball.com

As most of you have discovered as soon as you enter the site my web designing skills are lacking but I keep on trucking along.  I've tried many different designs for goldensnowball.com and so far I haven't liked any of them.  This is probably my fifth attempt and hopefully this one will be a keeper.  I also tend to ramble on so try to deal with it.  I don't see that changing anytime soon.  My off sense of humor cracks me right up.  Unfortunately I'm the only one it cracks up so that's something else you'll have to deal with.  If you get my sense of humor I strongly suggest you seek help, immediately if possible.

Anyways, the golden snowball website was started back in 2003 after reading an article by Sean Kirst in the Post Standard.  I've always been a big fan of Sean's articles and after reading about the revival of the Golden Snowball contest I thought it would be a fun idea to start up a website on the contest and see if I could keep up with it during the snowy months.   I looked on the internet to see if there was already a website covering the contest and found nothing.  So I decided to give it a shot.  How hard can it be to keep the stats up? 

The hardest thing about keeping the website updated is finding the time because of what I do for a living gets the busiest during the winter months.  Mostly the holiday months.  I suppose I could be considered a lame or wanna be web designer because I do build sites, but what I really do for a living is called affiliate marketing.  It's kind of like an online salesman.  I research merchants and products that are sold online.  Try to find the best merchants to deal with that have competitive prices and quality products and then build a website and share the information with my visitors.  An example is one of my other sites which is at http://www.holidayinflatables.info/ .  As for goldensnowball.com  I ended up going a different direction than my sales sites making it a site based on content.  More of a fun site to do.

Each year I try to add something new to the website.  Last year I thought it would be a good idea to offer up a cash prize to the winning city for a kids organization or to a school or something similar.  That seemed to go over pretty good so we kept it again for this year.  This year we added the new forum which you should stop by when you find some time. It at http://www.goldensnowball.com/phpBB/index.php

I receive quite a few emails from people in some of the other smaller city's that aren't included in the Golden Snowball contest and decided to try the "WOW You Got That Much Snow" contest.  Big mistake on my part by not planning it out better.  The way I planned it to work out was that people could nominate their town or city for the Wow contest and then maybe have the people that visit vote for which city would be included.  With the emails I was receiving about not being in the snowball contest I figured that a lot of smaller city's would be nominated.  That didn't happen so it ended up coming down to picking some city's and keeping the number down to four of them in the contest.  The mistake that I made was not checking to see whether I could get updates on the total snowfall for the citys.  NOAA didn't have them posted until the end of the year.  Anyways, next year if we have the Wow Contest the city's or towns that can be nominated will have to have a snow spotter that is willing to keep us up to date with the stats.  That should make that go a lot smoother.  Yea I know I'm rambling again.  Get use to it!

What is this section suppose to be about?  Oh Yea!  About us pretty much means about me.  When you read something that I post such as "we're looking for feedback" it really means I am looking for feedback.  We're kind of makes it look like a huge site with tons of people looking all over for stats and researching all over the place and so on.  I know just looking at the site your not that naive to think there is more than one person keeping it up.

The articles about the golden snowball pretty much say it all.  My Name is Patrick DeCoursey, I'm from Fremont, New York which is just outside the city of Syracuse.  Anyways, I can be contacted at comments@goldensnowball.com with any questions or comments.  I prefer comments over questions because with questions I have to think and with comments I can just read.  I'm joking!  Send away if you have any questions.