Introducing the Sacramento Web Professionals
The Sacramento Web Professionals was formed to bring greater Sacramento area web developers and designers together to exchange knowledge, ideas, and build business relationships. We have a monthly meeting which can be tracked on Eventful.com.
A little Background
As a freelance html/css specialist, I’ve found that few web design/development companies - large or small - actually do everything in-house. They might hire out their Flash work to a Flash specialist, or hire design work out to another design firm or individual.
I began thinking it would be nice if I knew more people in the Sacramento web design community. Then I thought to myself “WHAT Sacramento web design community?” I tried to find web design related events and functions in the area, and found very few. There was a meetup group formed a few years ago, but it never seemed to have good turnout as far as I know.
Before the June 2007 meetup, I found as many local web designers as I could on the search engines and sent them all an email inviting them to attend the June 2007 meeting. I also manually messaged people already signed up for the meetup.com group via the meetup.com website to let them know that some people would actually be attending the June meeting.
We ended up with 11 people in attendance in June, and 9 attending in July. I think this is a humble, but promising start…
Roadmap
The original and primary goal is to foster a better web design/development community in the Sacramento area. The web is so multi faceted that many companies and individuals now have specialized skills. We are becoming more complementary and less competitive, and we should take advantage of the complementary relationships we have with each other.
By having monthly meetings, we can build lasting friendships and business partnerships, as well as share our knowledge with one another. We can also do this with an online forum which will be rolled out by August. As we move forward, perhaps some ideas will present themselves on how we can make the meetings and the website an even better resource.
A logical extension of this website is to make it not only a resource for web professionals, but for businesses and individuals who are seeking Sacramento area web design/development services. To begin with, I’d like to focus more on bringing together the designers and developers, and focus on presenting/promoting ourselves to businesses in need of web design/development at a later date.
Participate
We encourage participation at the monthly meetings. If you’d like to cover a specific topic or give a 10-20 minute presentation, just get in touch. As I mentioned above, the forum is not yet in place, but we’ll have a forum thread for each upcoming meeting where you can suggest topics or volunteer to give a presentation.