Who Are We????
The Hometown Team behind OurLosBanos.com

From time to time people want to know why websites start and who is behind them. This page is devoted to explaining a bit about OurLosBanos.com, the staff and our webmaster (s).

Click on this link to see more about what this site offer's its visitors.

In short OurLosBanos.com is a family-run community-focused website. The work of designing, building, creating the artwork for and writing the articles on this site is done by a husband and wife team who just happen to want to give something back to the city they live in.

We have no employees, no brick and mortar office, and no venture capital financiers behind us. We do all of our own work. (Which is all copyrighted by the way.) We write all of our own reviews, we write all of the commentary, we do all of the html, photography, graphics and web design ourselves as a way to do our little part for this city.

What we lack in budget we make up for in 'heart' and the the thousands of hours of work we have put into making this site what it is.

Our intention for OurLosBanos.com is to fill a niche that we perceived - and in so doing we hope to help other people who are interested in the Los Banos California community. We own our own great website design business - a tiny unfinanced operation as well - so we had the expertise to create the site and keep it on the air long-term, but OurLosBanos.com is not intended to be an extension of Memorable Places Consulting. OurLosBanos.com is a labor of love. And, as much as we like our web design business, Memorable Places is well... labor... :-)

That being said, we take OurLosBanos.com just as seriously as if we had designed it for a paying client and our commitment to keeping the site on the air and updated is just as strong if not stronger than it would be if we had been commissioned to do a site such as this. Maybe a little stronger :-)

In Depth:

The idea for a website devoted to serving the residents, citizens and visitors to Los Banos California is one that had been in the back of our minds since we moved into town. When we first moved into this city we knew nothing about the place and when it came to finding resources - from contractors to restaurants - we had nobody to ask. The truth is we were kind of lost in our new hometown. We had not yet built up any kind of social network and we did not even know where to GO to ask the right questions.

As time went on and we got our social network such as it is into place but we still found that we could benefit more varied and wide ranging opinions and information about our new home town. We sought to find a place online to go to ask questions and to help others - but we found none.

In short, there was a void that needed filling. New residents, tourists, and people thinking of moving to Los Banos Ca had no good centralized online resources for quickly finding out information about our city.

Likewise, folks who have lived in Los Banos forever and local business people who wanted to get more in depth information or be more participatory in helping others on a larger scale had no place to go to accomplish those tasks either.

So, we created...

Our vision for OurLosBanos.com is to try to help fill a void.

We believe that a positive and helpful online community meeting place can play an essential role in making The City Of Los Banos Ca an even better place to live than it already is. That is why OurLosBanos.com was created and more importantly why we created this site with the online interactive forums as such a central theme of the site. While the informational section gives our personal opinions, the Los Banos forum allows everyone to politely and responsibly share their views on almost any issue related to Los Banos.

We decided to open this website in the hopes that citizens of our town and visitors to the area would be able to have a single place where they could go and find links and information about the town, the people, and the events in Los Banos. It is our sincere hope that you will participate and that together as a community we can develop this site into a resource where people looking for information can come and be pointed to the right place every time. We like to think of OurLosBanos.com as a place to go to meet with other residents when its too hot, dark, rainy or inconvenient to all meet at the feet of Henry Miller's horse statue in 'the square'! :-)

What OurLosBanos.com is NOT:
OurLosBanos.com is NOT intended to be a website where you can get full and complete details about every event, business, council meeting, class or resource in town. We will endeavor to put as much as we possibly can in the way of announcements and calendars up, but providing extensive details or usurping other websites is not our intention. Instead we want to be a place where you can find links to those details - to be an an online roadmap if you will - but again, we do not intend to ever be a substitute for specialized or local business or organization websites.

What OurLosBanos.com IS:

We see ourselves as "Opinion Journalists" with an interactive twist.

We see part of the mission of OurLosBanos.com as being that of a guide, a place where you can come and find the Los Banos related resources you are looking for linked to this site. We also see ourselves as a good first stop to see what events are happening in town and we strongly encourage submissions for inclusion on our calendar of events section.

We also see OLB as a place where the community as a whole can participate in online discourse about anything and everything having to do with the experience of working, educating, playing, and living in our hometown. We see this online "community building" as the absolute top priority of this website. This is why so much space and effort is given to the Los Banos online forum section. The forum section is essentially an online bulletin board provided for those interested in Los Banos to post helpful questions, answers, and discussions on topics related to our town. You can also post for sale and wanted ads and there is even a board specifically made for people giving things away for free.

In addition to helping the residents of our town we hope that OurLosBanos.com will help those who are considering moving their business or residence into our community. When we moved here there was little in the way of online resources that could help people to get to know the town or to make intelligent decisions about moving here. There was no online place to go ask questions of people in the community and no good spot online to get a real feel for the city or people of Los Banos California. So part of the reason for generating this website is to fill that gap and give outsiders an idea about what the town is all about and give them a place to ask questions if they so desire.

The same applies to those visiting and vacationing in the city of Los Banos. Travelers need a place to ask questions and learn about the local recreation, events on the calendar, hotels, motels, and places to stay.

We like to think of OurLosBanos as a roadmap to any and all other Los Banos Resources and as a community gathering place where residents, visitors, and outsiders can discuss our town and some of the neat things that go on here.

We hope that members of the community will find OurLosBanos.com to be a cornerstone of their online experience especially when it comes to finding their way to other highly specialized LB websites.

We hope that you are as excited about the potential of this site as we are and we do encourage your feedback, participation, and suggestions. You can make those thoughts known to us either by contacting us directly or by posting your ideas, suggestions for improvement, or requests on the community forums.

Nuts And Bolts Of Our Website Design:

OurLosBanos.com or "OLB" for short was officially opened on August 28, 2006. At the time of opening there were already over 300 permanent web pages and a large uncounted number of supporting photographs and graphics. As of 03-27-2007 the number of pages on the site (not counting the forums) is somewhere near 1000.

The OLB website is always evolving and expanding. OurLosBanos.com continues to grow as we do more reviews, add opinion pieces, and expand our content into new areas of interest to those who visit our website. We hope the Los Banos Forum section will become a community resource that all who visit this site sign up for and use.

Memorable Places Web Design & Consulting handles all of the artistic and technical aspects of this website including setting up the servers and e-mail as well as securing hosting and domain services setting up the forums and more. Memorable Places does all of the design, graphic arts, page layout, webpage function design and all other associated technical tasks related to this site. The style, layout, aesthetic look, and workability of this site are also all the responsibility of MemorablePlaces.com.

Other Memorable Websites

Among the Great Websites Memorable Places Consulting has produced, besides OurLosBanos.com are the following representative samples.

The It's A Wonderful Life Webring:
The IAWL website has been featured in Yahoo Internet Life magazine and quite a few newspapers. This award winning WebRing showcases the movie "It's A Wonderful Life" a film starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. The it's A Wonderful Life Webring even has one of the original cast's websites on it.

CRPOA - California Reserve Peace Officers Association
The CRPOA is a group devoted to reserve police officers in California. Memorable Places produced a website for the California Reserve Peace Officer's Association.

Precise Automotive Repair:
Precise-Auto was a Mountain View auto repair facility located in California. Memorable Places maintained the Precise Auto web presence for them for most of a decade until they went out of business.

Jardine's Custom 1911 Gunsmith:
John Jardine of Jardine's Custom Gunsmithing builds very beautiful, supremely accurate, and extremely reliable custom 1911 style handguns. Mr. Jardine has built an extremely good reputation within certain 'special' groups in the US military for his custom pistols - though Jardine's Custom does build custom handguns for civilians as well.

Tactical Intervention Specialists:
Retired police SWAT Sergeant Mike Miller designs shooting equipment such as rifle slings for police, military, and others. Tactical Intervention Specialists is best known for a unique specialized rifle sling that is in use by snipers in both military and police circles. Tactical Intervention sells to private sector as well.

Valtro USA:
The firm of Valtro USA makes near custom (semi custom) 1911 style .45 pistols. Valtro semi custom handguns are made of superior metals with special design level tuning of John Browning's original concepts. Valtro's near custom 45's are some of the most accurate and reliable out of the box handguns available to the public.

The M1 Garand: An American Companion in Three Wars:
This M1 Garand details the M1 Garand Rifle and the author's experience in obtaining this historic firearm from the Civilian Marksmanship Program. There is a boatload of information about this historic rifle available on the M1 Garand site as well as super links to all sorts of M1 Garand information on the web.

Nor-Cal Precision:
Jerry Rice of Nor Cal Precision is an accomplished riflesmith who produces / tunes the world's most accurate Remington based tactical and sniper rifles for Police, Military, and others. Jerry Rice also produces superb varmint and hunting rifles.

Yosemite Valley Railroad .com:
YosemiteValleyRailroad.com is THE place online to find out about the history of this now defunct California railroad. The owner of this site is a well known expert on the YVRR and has contributed to many books articles and Museum exhibits. MemorablePlaces did not design the site they did tune the YVRR site for Search Engine Order and have gotten YosemiteValleyRailroad.com to be one of the top YVRR sites on Google.

The YVRR site is just one of a the websites that Memorable Places has tuned for search engine optimization with great success.

If you are looking for a great website design team contact Memorable Places!