Webmaster's Notes

What began as a couple of pages of information for the 2001 Home Tour has expanded into the rich site we have today, with over 600 photos of homes from prior Home Tours. Plus, there is now a significant number of historic views of Irvington homes, some available nowhere else but on this web site. With the introduction of on-line ticket sales directly from this site in 2006, we've entered a new era of convenience for Tour goers -- and find that we are attracting attendees from around the U.S., not just from the local neighborhood. To better serve our out-of-town guests, we have now begun listing the B&B inns within Irvington and in the surrounding neighborhoods.

This site was developed as an entirely volunteer effort by Jim Heuer of M-P System Services, Inc., with much input and assistance from the other members of the ICA Website Committee. The look and feel of this site was coordinated with Neil Kimmelfield who developed the original ICA administrative website, and since that time there continues to be cooperation with his able webmaster successors on that site.

It is the intention of the ICA to have this site expand over time. Future year's Tours will result in more photos added to the site, while keeping the 2001-2007 Tour photos and home descriptions available.

Thanks are due to the home owners who shared photos and allowed the Webmaster to take additional photos of their homes for this site. Thanks also to Roy Roos, who helped this effort by supplying information from his book The History and Development of Portland's Irvington Neighborhood; and thanks to Amy McFeeters-Krone for her article on the National Register and Oregon Special Assessment program. Finally, thanks to Nancy Niedernhofer, former National Register Coordinator for the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office, for providing information pertaining to the National Register of Historic Places.

We invite comment and suggestions about this site. Please feel free to send e-mail to the Webmaster via the link at the bottom of this page with your comments.

Another issue relates to the Domain Name for this website: www.irvingtonhometour.com When this name was registered, we weren't real clear about the distinctions regarding .COM, .ORG, .GOV, etc. In those go-go early days of the Internet, everything seemed to be DOT-COM, so that's what we registered. In fact, if we'd followed the rules, it would have had the .ORG master domain, since we are a community organization, not a for-profit company. As of January, 2004, if you browse to www.irvingtonhometour.org you will wind up here. We expect that we will leave the .COM version active indefinitely, since this site is referenced by quite a few others and is extensively indexed by all the Internet search engines.

The technology used by this site is designed to be accessible by most common browsers; however the best results will be achieved from Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher or Netscape Navigator 7.0 or higher. We haven't tried the Opera browser, but the latest versions of it should work fine. The great new FireFox browser works very well too.

The Irvington Community Association also maintains a website to provide services internal to the Irvington Community. We invite all Irvington neighbors and others interested in NE Portland community affairs to visit that site as well.