Since I am trying to get an internship with this company, I decided to familiarize myself with one of the web sites they manage. Virtual-Valley.com is a valuable resource for any resident of the valle y. Maintained by Informu.com, the site provides its own content as well as links to every single business in the valley.

I was impressed with the amount of links they had and the facility with which one could resolve all of their shopping needs right from this one site. The site allows you to search for businesses by town, by the type of business, or by name. I find that this would probably cover any possible situation. It lists separately the businesses that have their own sites, and then made individual pages with an address for all of the other businesses that weren't already on the web. For the larger local towns, th ey've gathered an awful lot of historical and other useful information, such as schools, churches, government, geography and population statistics.

I was however disappointed with a lot of the content that they provided for the site. For example, in the gaming section, the games were by far some of the lamest I had ever seen. They didn't even provide directions on how to play. There were a few oth er sections that were a little better but still lacked content. The restaurant search allows you to browse menus, there's also a site for those looking for jobs, there's a couple of chat lines, there's even free classifieds. They are currently working on a link to provide local music online, something I'm sure many artists will be scrambling to get onto.

The layout is attractively done. Considering that the first page alone links up to well over 200 sites, I was pretty impressed. They have two bit maps to provide many of the links which are very attractively done and are repeated throughout the site. T here also are several main links in the left column for the sites for which they develop the content. Finally, all of the businesses and towns are organized in a couple of scroll bars and are easy to locate.

The site doesn't offer many gadgets except a black logo that gradual gets color and then goes black again. This attracts attention to the name of the site. The site seems to have been well thought out and designed to be easy to manage. That's about all the excitement. I noticed that they've created and manage a good number of the business that they have links to. One more detail, from a businessperson's point of view, I think it was pretty smart of them to expose their newest member to the site by giving him a banner ad.