As a graduating journalism student at Southwest Texas State University I spent much of my time the last half of the school year looking at papers for employment.

Instead of traveling to all of the towns and cities to get copies of their papers I did most of my work on the web. One of my priorities when deciding where to take my talents was whether the publication was online or had any intention of going online in the near future.

When my adviser first approached me about the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise I naturally decided to go online and see what I could find. It turned out that I would find little to nothing. The only site of any merit that turned up was www.Seguin.net which told me a great deal about the city but nothing about the publication.

I went to my job interview with the firm conviction that if the paper had no plans to go online that I would look elsewhere. After learning of my experience with the Internet they assured me that the paper was indeed looking to go online and as the months moved forward a framework was developed by our corporate web guru Greg Mefford.

We initially looked to go live with the site much earlier but ran into various problems that kept pushing the date back. We started updating the beta site that wasn't available to the public, in late September on a daily basis. That served as both practice for me and for those who will

take care of the site when I'm on vacation or out sick. It also helped create an archive of searchable stories.

Like most everything else the website development almost came to a complete halt during the middle of October as floodwaters raged in Seguin. Without a dependable phone connection, much less an Internet connection, updating was impossible and further development was difficult.

We fought through the difficulties and archived everything for one massive update once we regained access to the Internet. Most of the flood stories are online now and can be accessed by typing "flood" in the search box. After doing so you might want to go get something to eat and

drink because the list is a long one that takes a great deal of time to load. I got a number of e-mails from people who wanted to know where the flood pictures were but unfortunately we didn't work most of the problems with our picture process until right before we went online. We still are running into smaller difficulties that result in the picture not changing everyday. We hope to have that fixed in the near future.

Currently the only items that are going online are stories that appear on the front page or page two, sports stories, obituaries, staff columns and classifieds. In the future we hope to run a version of the paper's This and That column on the site so that residents can see what local events are planned.

While the site will certainly be a boon to our local readership in allowing them to search through old stories, its much broader impact will be beyond the boundaries of Guadalupe County.

The newspaper going online gives people looking to visit or move to the Seguin area an opportunity to read about the city and county government, the school districts and community events. With classifieds being online they could even find potential housing and make contacts with realtors in the area. The newspaper really is one of the best windows into a community and to have such a window into Seguin and Guadalupe County on the Internet is a great treasure.

Come visit at www.seguingazette.com and drop us a line at seguinnews@seguingazette.com

Chris Lykins is the city beat reporter for the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise as well as webmaster and systems manager.

To contribute to the Internet Beat column, contact Gloria R. Rivera at 303-5526, fax 372-1418, riverag@connecti.com or http://www.seguin.net .