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"What's This Website All About?"

This week's letter is a little bit creative in that I haven't written it to any specific person. Instead, I wrote a letter to all of the visitors who somehow found this site and wondered, "What is this all about?"

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March 4, 2009

Dear Visitor,

I have no idea how you stumbled upon our site and found yourself reading this letter, but I thank you for making it this far.  I hope you don’t mind that I refer to you as “visitor” – it seems a little impersonal now that you are actually taking the time to read what I have to say.   I want to tell you a little bit about why I decided to develop this site and what I intend to do with it.

I had this idea a long time ago.  After graduating from college, I found it harder and harder to keep in touch with old friends – especially those who lived far away.  Though the advent of e-mail made it easier than ever, over time I found some relationships just weren’t being maintained.  The idea was simple – every week I would try to write an e-mail to a rotating list of friends so that I made sure that I kept contact with the people that I cared about most.

The idea was great, the implementation was not.  I never created the list, I never sent the letters.  To this day, I have friends out there that I haven’t spoken to in years.

So when I was thinking of a concept for a website, I simply borrowed the idea of writing one letter per week.  Besides, it’s a pretty catchy title, don’t you think?

My wife is now pregnant with our first child – a girl.  I think it’s important that I become a good role model for my daughter.  As such, I didn’t want to build a site that might generate popularity through shock-blogging or insulting humor. I am buidling this site with my daughter in mind and I don't want it to be something that she cannot read until she is 18.

The project I have built here is somewhat educational – I strongly believe that writing is a valuable learning exercise and I intend to fill the site with writing resources and references.

Not only is the project educational, but I if I take it in the right direction it could become inspirational on many levels.  Beyond the catchy title, what I’d like to do is feature one letter per week on the site and monitor the effects the letter may have.  Does the letter get a reply?  Is the reply positive or negative?  Will any of our featured letters make a difference in someone’s life – anyone, anywhere?  Will we raise money for a charity?  Will we inspire someone to pick up a pen and write their own letter to someone that might make a difference?  If this site raises awareness to a worthy cause or motivates a person to sit down and write a letter of their own then I would consider this project a success.

Right now this is week #4 and I am personally writing the site’s featured letter for the fourth time.  That means that I’ve had no volunteer writers – in fact only a handful of people even know this site exists.  Hey, you need to start small and I’m willing to do that in the hopes that by the time my daughter can come to appreciate what I’ve built, it could become something much bigger.

I tend to think way ahead of myself when I get involved in projects like this one.  I have enterprising thoughts like turning this site into a non-profit organization.  We would raise awareness to worthy causes and raise money for charities through our site’s letters.   We could assemble volunteers to some noble cause or champion someone who is doing it on their own.  Perhaps we could even begin our own scholarship fund to pave the way for our most inspirational guest writers with college futures.

But for now, it’s just me and my laptop – seemingly writing letters to nobody but myself and the people who receive them directly.  One day I hope to look back at this letter and say, “Wow – look how small we started and look at what we have accomplished since then.”  But for now, I just would like to thank you for coming to visit and please check in each week to see what our next letter is about.

Sincerely,

Scott Riecke

 

If you would like to comment on this letter, Scott can be reached at info@aletteraweek.com.

*Please note that since this letter was written, I have decided to personally write a letter each week, while also posting a weekly letter authored by a guest writer.