About ByronBayRegion.com & GuideToByron.com

Question: What is ByronBayRegion.com ?

(And, while we're at it.... what is GuideToByron.com?)

Answer: An online community information portal.

A what?

portal –noun

1.	a door, gate, or entrance, esp. one of imposing appearance, as to a palace.

2.	an entrance to a tunnel or mine.

3.	Computers. a Web site that functions as an entry point to the Internet, as by providing useful content and linking to various sites and features on the World Wide Web

Well, you... um...knew that...ok...well, why don't we just start with the maps!

Warwick Pascoe

Warwick Pascoe is both a talented trained draughtsman, airbrush artist and highly accomplished glass artist and he has combined his brilliant technique, eye for detail, creativity and practical experience to produce the most remarkable set of detailed maps of Byron Bay and the hinterlands, making the everyday destinations of Byron life easy to find in a handy, usable and enjoyable form.

Locals know there has long been a need for this seemingly simple but in fact awesome task to be undertaken and anyone who views Warwick's collection judges them a timely success, invaluable to locals, tourists, alike and a boon to the hospitality and accommodation and travel industries, which are the mainstays of the local economy.

The Pocket Guides that Warwick has developed as a convenient and useful format for presenting the maps have found a resonance in the community and there is a groundwell of interest among the local community in this handy little pocket sized local reference guide, which combines the maps with a comprehensive local business directory, so that the many small businesses in the community can be found with ease and at the same time get a chance to display their colour and style in the advertising listings to people checking out the maps. It's already proven to have a high retention rate among users, in glove boxes and on the kitchen bench.

The natural complement to this is an on-line version, and that's where we come in.

Peter Harris

Peter Harris is another multi-talented local with a creative bent. Peter is currently the music teacher at the Cape Byron Steiner School, but is well known for his many artistic pursuits, most notably his simply magical Australian native animal soft toys and puppets from the Secret Gully project. In the process of marketing Secret Gully and developing web-sites for the Steiner school and other projects Peter has become quite of a web guru. Peter is also a talented photographer and the beautiful imagery of Byron Bay you will see adorning the GuideToByron portal are examples of his original photographic work.

Barry Ferrier

For some years Peter has had a creative collaboration with well known local musician Barry Ferrier. Barry has a PhD in multimedia and has lectured for over ten years at Universities and TAFE in interactive art and the creative use of computers..and he's also run Inner Spring Media, a local web & graphic design business for 15 years , and so, when the GuideToByron project began to take shape, Barry was called on board to make up the new team and spread the load.

Thus it came to pass that the ByronBayRegion.com / GuideToByron.com Team was born, and this huge but exciting online project began to take shape.

Having such a great real world resource as the Pocket Guide publications and Warwick's comprehensive series of very practical, easy-to-use maps of Byron Bay and the hinterlands is a great starting point for any internet site. There are other Byron Bay community information sites of course, but as is often the case with the web, the eyes glaze over when confronted with what are basically a lot of lists of businesses. The maps are the core of ByronBayRegion.com & GuideToByron - they are of real value in so many real world situations.

Simultaneously both ByronBayRegion.com & GuideToByron.com becomes an online presence and advertising portal for the many local businesses who are finding the Pocket Guides a great way to advertise and reach customers, old and new. And then of course it complements and enriches the potential customers experience by supporting the information in the Guides, "unpacking" the ads with graphics, offering live links to more in depth follow-up advertising, building traffic to their websites web-sites, and simplifying email contact and online transactions.

The logical extension from here is to extend the portal out into the community and build a resource that is useful informative and entertaining to the whole community and set up a place for exchange and dialogue, news and fun....include the kids, celebrate a bit of our history and the colour and vibrance of Byron Bay life.

Sorry, is vibrance a real word?

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