Before Dancing

My first web page was a matter of need. As a programmer I needed a means to distribute the daily changes in the beta version of our software to those persons across the world who were testing and reporting on the software for us.

From there I decided to create a personal page. It included general information and links as well as some information on the main program I work on. It also included a small number of photos (I've been a photographer since 1967). That page is now a table of contents gallery page to regular photos and photos of dancing around Kansas City.

Later I added a set of pages about personal spiritual experiences and my searches for answers about existence. The baseline experience was my grandmother's death in 1977 when she appeared to me at the time of her death, some 300 miles away.

My personal pages are located separately at http://www.planetkc.com/dancer.

Dancing

When I plunged heavily into dancing in early 1997 at the Kansas City Swing Dance Club, after taking instruction on a sometimes on (starting with Arthur Murray), mostly off, basis across the previous three and a half years (taking time away to work on programs), I found early on that I and my dance partners were getting praise from other persons in nightspots.

Since we were REALLY beginners at that time I tried to tell those people who asked us where we learned to dance that they should head for the Kansas City Swing Dance Club (KCSDC). I would write this note on a piece of paper. I felt a bit inadequate because I didn't have anything to hand out.
 

Where To Learn

So I decided to write a page of information that I could hand out. I started with a regular word processing document. The idea was to have a paragraph about the KCSDC, copy it to three or four locations on the page, print the pages and cut it into strips, each of which I would hand out. About the same time the Heartland Swing Dance Club was started by Patricia Searing and I began to attend group dance lessons at Walter's Dance Center, for ballroom. So immediately my idea expanded to one page with three paragraphs, one for each of the group lesson places.

About this time I decided it would be handy for a lot of people if I added this information as a page on my site. I re-organized my site into a home area, with branches to a spiritual section and a dance section. For some time the dance section was the original three-paragraph informational piece on where to get group lessons. Before going out dancing I would print a number of these pages and take them with me so that I could give the information to persons who came up to us looking for somewhere they could go to learn to dance "as well" as us. I say "as well" with some trepidation because I am still talking about beginner levels.

But I figured that if these people could applaud our performance and if they wished that they too could do this then I knew that I could tell them 1) that we we really beginners and that 2) since we were beginners it meant that they too could get to this level in a short time and have just as good a time dancing and feeling good about it in any nightspot.
 

Where To Go

By this time I was going out to a number of locations and I wanted to know where else to go. It turned out that even the most experienced dancers at the clubs didn't have a really good list of nightspots to go to for dancing. None of the local news sources were any help. The Kansas City Star's Friday "Preview" section carried a night life section as did the Pitch Weekly but neither one could tell you where the dancing was. There is a lot of music but not so much dancing.

So I decided to do my own dance-places page and distribute it on my web site. It grew steadily as I found more and more places which had dance floors, or offered dancing or allowed dancing in some other way. (In Overland Park the zoning regulations put a heavy legal and monetary toll on anyone with a dance floor so I learned that OP locations, even if they have dancing often won't say so. They get very guarded when you ask in person, suspicious, actually, wondering whether I am some undercover zoning inspector, or whatever.)
 

Brochure

By fall of 1997 I decided to turn my information page into a brochure that I could hand out. I now have a four-section double-fold brochure that I take with me to hand out and which I also distribute in bunches around the city for people to pick up. The brochure lists ongoing, open to all, good group lessons. No one listed in the brochure pays to be included. I take this around because those first persons who asked (in Blayney's in Westport) got me started and because I know there are a lot of other persons who would like to know where to learn to dance with minimal pain and minimal embarrasment.
 

Fills My Own Needs as Well

As you can tell, not only did the size of the site grow but so did its coverage. My original intentions of supplying some helpful information were long ago supplanted with a whole new set of concepts about who Kansas City Dancing is for. In the future there are more ideas relating to promoting dancing. There are personal reasons as well. For so very many years (decades) I didn't dance. I was hugely intimidated by merely going near a nightspot with music just because there might be dancing there. I pushed myself past that point and when I see someone else who would like to dance and who isn't I really want to get information to them about where to get lessons.

The site was originally designed to list only the low-priced and good group lessons which are available to anyone at anytime. Most of the focus is still in that direction. I also list those dance studios which offer private lessons. These too are valuable and every student finds their own way to learn dancing. I had avoided listing private dance studios at first because I and many others had paid a lot of money for such lessons (and they were good) but we couldn't afford to keep spending money at that level. So I was most interested in lessons anyone could afford at any time and which were open to all.
 

Domain Name : KCDance.Com

In the spring of 1978 I changed the site from a regular dial-up account to a domain name. Domain-hosting prices finally met a range that I felt I could afford. I don't make money from the site so I can't depend on the site to pay for itself. That despite the "com" in the name. I felt a domain name would help to make the site easier to remember and easier to type. This also allows me to use the commonly expected "www" at the start of the name rather than the "users" I had had with the previous site.
 
The hit counter is very simple. I added that in late 1978. The amount shown is an estimate of the number of hits from the start of this site. I was getting more than 1,500 hits a month at that point. I then reset the counter number to reflect the hits from February 1997 to December 1978. I started with the hits-per-day at that time and reduced the hits as I estimated backward. Despite the reduction the hits seemed like so many I redid the estimate to push the number a little lower. Still, over time, the hits add up and I suspect the estimate may have been a bit modest.
 
So, I have more growth with more changes in the future, both to me and to my site.