About the Coloma Valley Web Site

The Coloma Valley website has been in continuous operation since August 1, 1995, making it one of the longest-running community websites in the world. In 2003, the South Fork of the American River section of the site was split off to form the basis of The American River web site.

Both The Coloma Valley and The American River are joint projects of Coloma Communications and the Coloma-Lotus Chamber of Commerce.

The Coloma.com "look and feel" is based on an original design by Rafael McMaster of Catalyst Creative Marketing, and features one of Betty Sederquist's fabulous photographs of the South Fork of the American River canyon with spring poppies. Betty also contributed many of the informational articles featured in the site. Donna McMaster, owner of Coloma Communications, is the site's founder and webmaster.

You Can Help!

You can help us keep the site up to date! If you have calendar events or other news to share, see our News page for several ways to communicate with the readers of the web site. If you have additions or corrections to our material, or would like to submit an article, please use our Contact Form.

Brags

The Coloma Valley website was a finalist for The Dotties (formerly known as the "Sacramento Web Awards") in both 1999 and 2006.

Technical Notes

We make every effort to make the Coloma Valley and American River sites download quickly, meet web standards, look nice, and be accessible with any browser, including WebTV, Lynx, or browsers designed to assist people with disabilities. Please contact us if there is anything on the site that is difficult for you to read or access, or if you want to suggest changes. If the fonts are a bit funky, you are probably using a browser that does not conform to the HTML 4.0 standards. See the Web Standards Project page for more information.

These sites are hosted by Coloma Communications, running Apache web server software on Red Hat Linux servers. Our proprietary McWebby database software enables us to keep the sites up to date. McWebby is built with the powerful open source PHP programming language and MySQL database, and we are indebted to the communities that support these tools and the Linux operating system.

Finally, we are delighted to be able to use Unix-based MacOS X for our development, and are glad that Apple is doing well these days so that we needn't switch to the Dark Side. (We do test pages on Windows PCs and with a variety of browsers to ensure that they are universally accessible.) We use BBEdit for most web development, with help from Adobe's products (Photoshop and occasionally Illustrator and GoLive).