Neighborhood Portrait
I moved to White Bear Lake a few years ago to be closer to my record store, having found a great house in the Cottage Park neighborhood via an earlier project. The Homeowners Association needed a website to show the neighborhood’s history and as a point of contact for people interested in moving here.
Nothing complicated needed – used the responsive Foundation framework for the code. Met with some long-time residents to gather some history from 1885 through to the formation of the Cottage Park Homeowners Association in the 1980s. In the process, we found this quote from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:
“Near Saint Paul and Minneapolis are several points of interest… The White Bear Lake area is less known. It is a lovely sheet of water and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the state…there are a dozen minor summer resorts around St.Paul and Minneapolis, but White Bear is the resort.”
Another neighbor has contributed his SEO skills to the project, so that people can find the site when they’re looking for it (and otherwise go about their business elsewhere). He recommended we add a video, so we took an artistic drive-through using some music I wrote with Boiled In Lead. The solo section of “Drowning” was slowed to 75% (way too easy in Final Cut) to fit the video running time.
Looking forward to more years “up da lake.”