This is how we're feeling at Windmill Works! If ONLY it were just vacuuming and mopping the floor, then we'd be just physically
exhausted. But for the past month or so, it's been a complete web site revamping and all I can say
is that our exhaustion is under some kind of comprehensive plan: we're physically, mentally, and any-other-way exhausted!
We did an entire remodeling of our Kids' Page, adding new learning activities for deaf and hard of hearing students, English As a Second Language learners, and
mainstream students as well - a lot of syntax, i.e., sentence structure stuff, subject-verb agreement grammar exercises, and
a whole bunch of other things I'm frankly just too exhausted to list! Please take a look and see what you think.
Mainstream teachers, speech pathologists, special education teachers, and parents, we would love to know if these
activities are as meaningful as we're thinking they will be. Just sign in at our brand new guestbook and your comments will be posted.
Next we've added more high school and college activities which are accessible from the kids' page. In our soul searching of ethical practices,
we decided to continue to keep the page for the young kids totally free of advertising or any other links except those to
the Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream Speech," and the "Gettysburg Address," (We've judged those
links as very safe). For the high school and college kids, we have decided to put some links to educational products
at Amazon.com and to add pertinent google ads. The reality is, to keep a website afloat, there does need to be
some revenue from clicks - just so we can buy some fruit and vegetables at Trader Joes to keep body and soul together
until our ship comes in - which reminds me of a sign I saw somewhere around Surf City (Huntington Beach) last year.
It's one that all of us probably can embrace in these economic times:
"I hope my
ship comes in before the dock rots!"
Back to the site: We've also tried to make our navigation
easier to help visitors locate our software products. So we've repeated a list of our educational software
games on several pages (For example, on our home page, our biz blog page, our Scooter's dog blog page and so on.)
But through all the exhaustion, we've learned a lot - especially
me (Billie). I'm getting pretty comfortable with cutting and pasting html code and recording mp3 files and putting
up cute little avatars like the costumed girl from oddcast.com on our home page.
It seems as if
it's a time when we all are working a bit harder just to get by, but if I think if we all pull together and try to
help each other out, if we continue to feel a greater commitment to each other and to our fragile little planet - we
will not only get by, but we'll thrive once again! Yes, we can.
