 Good afternoon. My name is Winstina Hughes. I started my WordPress blog on Maplewood, New Jersey in 2008, a year after I graduated from Rutgers with a degree in planning and public policy. I returned home to Maplewood thinking that it would be wonderful to share what I'd learned in school. I thought it was really fascinating, and I thought that people would be interested in learning a bit more about local development and real estate. And so I decided that I would essentially put my term papers on my blog. I thought people would want to read it. And so before I continue further, and this is a tough act to follow from the last speaker, but I spend a fair amount of my time explaining what city and regional planning is. And so my profession seems a little complicated. But really, and this is with the American Planning Association, our professional organization says it's a dynamic profession that works to improve the welfare of people in their communities. Good planning helps to create communities that offer better choices to where and how people live. So when I came, I wanted to spark a conversation about planning in my community. I was sure someone wanted to know about planning locally, about local development, about our jitney system, about New Jersey Transit's Midtown Direct train that took commuters to work every day. I was sure they wanted to know about local buses and single family homes for closure rates. Love this stuff. Real estate and property taxes. I was itching to add all this stuff online. And I first started by getting my family on my blog. I thought, let them read it. And they started, they were pretty loving about it. They wanted to give me great feedback. And I thought that they were the only visitors. And then I realized that my blog resonated with other people. It was a magical moment when our mayor left a comment. And he left a comment inviting me to reach out to him with his phone number to discuss planning in our town. I was offered an opportunity to write for the New York Times blog, The Local, about residents in New Jersey that work in my field. A local commuter asked me how to get to her nearest jitney stop, which I think would be an easier route for her to take. And after I added the jitney schedule to my blog, our township website was updated with that jitney information. And then a woman who was thinking about moving to Maple Wood left a comment that my blog helped her learn more about Maple Wood. One of my readers even interviewed me on property tax redistribution. And it was a pretty difficult way to kind of explain what was going on, especially since I didn't have that type of knowledge. But I asked an old teacher who's a zoning lawyer at my high school who actually inspired me to go into planning. And so I want to move on to the reason why my blog was so successful. It's successful because I use wordpress.com. It was perfect for several reasons. As a recently graduated student with very little money, I loved it. It was free, perfect. It has a back end interface that's easy to navigate. I never had to worry about brute force attacks about anyone hacking to my site because automatic handles that. The dashboard became intuitive. And after publishing a few posts, it was pretty easy to walk through the process. And I didn't have to worry about spam. I didn't have to worry about anything else. It was already handled. And there was something really cool, too, that was part of my blog. And it's this thing called analytics. I didn't know how important analytics was until I started on, as I wrote my content, I continued on. I'm a little nervous. So I want to give you an example of what's planned versus what's needed. Just for you to see exactly what I'm talking about and the topics that I brought up in my blog. This is an example of a parking lot that was designed at my school. It looks perfect. The designer, the engineer, thought it was wonderful. But students created the path that they actually needed. What we don't see is there's actually a bus stop behind those students. And they found the quickest route that they possibly could to get to the bus so that they could get to class on time. Now, does this image spark a thought in you? Do you have an idea of a life hack that you created that solves a particular experience that you have in your town? So for example, do you cross a particular street rather than another because you have drivers that just barrel down the road and they don't even think to stop? Are you not comfortable going for a walk with your dog simply because you're not sure what route to take? And so I say to you that a blog would be a great way for you to share your experience and to give recommendations to people in your town. And I'm sure that you'll start a conversation. So get engaged in the planning process. That's something that we want everyone to do. And just as a future planner, citizen participation and community engagement makes the planning process so much easier because it takes individual voices to move programs and initiatives forward that make quality of life better. So before I start, I want to share a negative wisdom with you. When you write about your community and you write about real estate, you actually have the ability to make a huge impact. If you say something that's negative, it could cost your town millions and millions of dollars. Maybe a business chooses not to relocate to your town because you didn't say something nice about them. And since we love where we come from, it's helpful to just keep that in mind so we don't cause the very place that we want to help a negative experience. So if you're thinking about starting a blog on community engagement in your town and you have a topic that you want people to know more about, what I would say to you is that there are a few things that you can do to start the process. You can create a plan. I want you to think of the issue that you care the most about. And when you think about this issue, I want you to consider that there is somebody in your town who has the power to make these changes. So I want you to figure out who that person is and you want to go to the meetings in your town where they are, because this provides you the opportunity to engage the people who have the influence that can make the change that you want. So if you want that stop sign that's in a really unsafe place and you just don't feel comfortable walking to the park, you want to go to your zoning board meeting or your planning board meeting. They have the power to make those changes. Now, after you've gone to the meetings, I want you to consider publishing interviews about other people who have these experiences in your town. So maybe your neighbor too has this concern. Or maybe you stop that driver one day and you say, look. You almost hit me and I'd like to share my experience in yours as well. You never know. They might actually let you interview them about their experience. Maybe they're rushing to work. Maybe this happened or that happened. And you start a conversation in a dialogue. And you can publish these interviews. People love sharing their stories and they love coming back to your site and seeing that you've shared their stories. They love to be engaged as well. And then I also say to you to advertise your blog. One of the things that I'm going to show you that's great about WordPress is the fact that it has the ability to be able to help you reach the people that you want to. So I'm going to say familiarize yourself with dashboard. It really has everything that you need. As you can see, there's their site stats. And that allows you to go and see the analytics. What are your top posts? What are the words, the words that people use to get to your site? Choose your keywords wisely. I put a case study on suburban planning in Maplewood. And then I got a comment from our mayor saying that he had received Google Alerts. And the Google Alerts let him know that my blog existed. So when you take the time to add words like a case study on Maplewood in your dashboard, when you go into your settings, it can really yield some really exciting results for you. Because it'll bring people to your blog that you want to know are aware of what it is you're writing about. I also recommend being transparent. When I started my blog, I told them that I was a student. I told them that I just wanted to share what I'd learned and that I wanted my community to start having a conversation on planning issues. And so when people came, they knew. I also welcomed my visitors. We have conversations about sections. And so you know why you're coming to a site. But people love for you to welcome them. And I did that. I also responded to comments. Here's the comment where someone was asking me how to get to a Jitney stop. And so I said to her, if I were to do it, this would be how I'd go about it. Another thing that you should do is study your analytics. I concluded my blog about a year after I started it. And I really did that because I wanted to stay on message. And I felt that I covered everything that I needed to. And even today, in November of this year, I still have people visiting. I have 91 visitors in November. And they've looked at the content about 137 times. Those are the hits. I see the top pages that people go to. And I even see the countries. And this is all in WordPress.com. I didn't have to add Google Analytics. There was nothing special I had to deal with. It was all right there. And I don't know how to code. I'm not a developer. I haven't done a plug-in. So all that technical knowledge wasn't something that I needed. Also, I say, create a poll or two. This is another way of engaging people in your content. When you write those interviews and you share someone else's story and you show that you guys have a mutual interest, they'll come and see your site. And they'll come to read comments. And a poll or two is another way to engage people. And as a matter of fact, as you can see here, only five people took votes. But over the course of my blog, I've had about 1,200 visitors. So when you see five votes, you really don't get a sense of the fact that people have come and they've actually looked at the site. And my final thought is to be ethical. As developers, you have so much power. You can look at the IP addresses. You know the email addresses that people leave. And so you know how to reach and find people. But I had a wonderful experience quite recently. I made some friends on Twitter and they were actually pretty helpful. And so I know that this particular slide really isn't relevant to the WordPress community because the WordPress community is ethical. We do care and we're really not gonna do anything that's gonna hurt WordPress, nor I think will we do anything to hurt our own communities where we live. Thank you so much.