Our Blog

As our business grows and finds its place in the community we are evolving to fill an important need. We are a guide to the great people and places of the Mid-Hudson Valley, and it seems that many of those great people are local business owners. The health of a community has much to do with its economy, so we are happy to be a forum for local small business owners. This sort of intimate look through video and photo imagery helps people to feel familiar with a shop or town, thus increasing tourism and helping locals to choose to spend locally instead of with big box stores. If we can go in and meet the owners, our buying experience isn’t just about getting something but about relationships. Every ad you see here is not advertising in the traditional sense (or at least that’s what we’d like to think). Each represents a life, a family, a member of your community who put their heart and soul into their business, their livelihood. Please tell them you saw them in VISITvortex.

Putting the winter issue of the magazine together was very exciting because it embodied the spirit of winter and the holidays in the area—snow and warmth and getting together with family and friends. While you look through our little mag and browse the website this season, please take advantage of the special offers and let the business owners know they are being seen. The more we can support each other economically, the stronger of a community we’ll have. I’d like to thank the people of this community for creating a great feeling of connection, where we can all work, live, and play together. We want to also thank all of you for helping us to grow and giving us so much support. Coming very soon.... THE SPRING ISSUE, which also means SPRING is coming!!!!

Many nights it begins by dreaming of the site, then tossing and turning, then consciously thinking until I just get on up and start working on it. Seems like this usually happens about 3 or 4 in the morning. Now the sun is about to come up, and I've got some real focused work done. Nobody needs me at 3am so I can do my very best work. We've been visioning how to make this site better for you, how to make it run faster, how to make it make sense to anyone. It's been almost a year since the site has launched and we can now see what our strengths and weaknesses are. So it seems I'm weeding, getting rid of all the clutter that's crowding out the flowers. The flowers are our videos, the stories about our community and its businesses. Our strengths are not in listing everything that exists, but in featuring locations through video and imagery. So hopefully very soon you will see some major changes in the site. Being a print designer I can easily take an idea and go straight to final product on my own. But alas, I do not know about web coding. So we need to take ideas and then translate them to others and then into real code which you see on the site. We've learned so much in this year, the biggest lesson has been to focus on our strengths. We hope to be able to translate our vision of a strong community through VISITvortex. Maybe I can take a bit of a nap before getting the kids ready for school.