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 900 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 initially 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. In 2008, our talented volunteer designer Hether Dunn provided a refreshed look and feel to the website consistent with the Tour's printed posters and other materials. That new look and feel has been continued into a number of new areas of the site. Older parts of the site have not been retrofitted.

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 2001-2009 Tour photos and home descriptions available. In 2009, the Irvington Community Association Board of Directors voted funds for a multi-year project to upgrade and modernize the site's infrastructure so as to enable it to continue to grow and serve represent our neighborhood in the years to come. You'll be seeing the results of that effort in the next couple of years. Will we run out of houses to feature, you ask... Currently we have photo essays on 81 homes and historic buildings in a neighborhood comprising some 2800 houses of which 85% are considered "historic" and retain their architectural character. We have a long way to go before we run out of great homes to present here!

Thanks are due to the home owners who shared photos and allowed the Webmaster to take additional photos of their homes for this site (not to mention thanks for opening their homes to 1200+ visitors on Tour Day). 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 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.