On December 31, SitesWI was officially shut down. The domain name will remain active for one year and will direct users to the LOIS landing page on forwardwi.com. This will give visitors a chance to reset their bookmarks.

To become part of LOIS, realtors will be encouraged to contact Sharon at Forward Wisconsin. She will coordinate efforts among realtors and economic developers to determine who will be most qualified to enter buildings and sites into the system.

How we envision the new process:

1. A realtor or economic development organization contacts Forward Wisconsin requesting the realtor service.
2. Sharon evaluates the request and gets in contact with the appropriate economic development organization.
3. After getting approval from each ED organization, Sharon completes the online request form.
4. LocationOne generates a profile and notifies Sharon when the information packet has been sent to the realtor/broker.
5. A realtor logins in, enters data and clicks on submit. Economic developers who have the same localities in their profile will then approve the listings and send them to the live site. Listings will then roll up into Forward's view. This final step can be automated if everyone is in agreement.

Please contact Sharon at 608-261-2501 if you have any comments or questions about this process.

The Resource Guidebook is now online and available in PDF at LocationOne.com. The folks at LOIS have conveniently named it as the Data Dictionary.

Statistics prove it. More and more site selection consultants are conducting online searches. They depend on LOIS to provide them with the data they are looking for, including property contact information. We at Forward Wisconsin also depend on that information, to pass on to site selectors, who make confidential search requests. It's more important now than ever to make sure that your contact information appears in LOIS.

Two main contact sections in LOIS:

1. At the bottom of all main pages:
-User Settings tab, Contact Information

2. In each building and site property contact link:
-Edit, Overview dropdown, Contact Information
-This information rolls up into Forward's view which is why it is cruicial to have this part of LOIS populated with data!

On December 8 LOIS announced the completion of the following enhancements:

• Links to more sections in LOIS were added. See article below for details.
• An image upload feature was added to the administration screens.
• A zoning field was added as a dropdown to the Advanced Search page in the Sites section.

• Print multiple records into one PDF flyer (Shopping Cart) - By January 2006
• XML for State, County and Metro sections - By 1st quarter 2006
• Modify Date Filter in User Settings - By January 2006

Did you know that you can link to other web pages in LOIS besides the buildings and sites pages? You can do so much more to enhance your organization's web site by linking to LOIS. It's a great way to benefit from one of the best free tools ever made available to the public! The link below will open a page which highlights all the possible links you can set up on your web site.

Each month, we list communities who have linked to LOIS. See links in lower lefthand corner. We recently added the Rock County Development Alliance and the City of West Bend to our list.

We are in the process of updating the photos on the Forward Wisconsin home page. We'd like to begin highlighting other prominent landmarks from around the state. Please help us out by sending us a photo of a famous landmark from your area. Photos need to be in jpg format in landscape mode. Ideal sizes would be 7" wide by 3" deep or 504 pixels x 216 pixels. Be sure you have obtained any necessary permissions from the photographer if you are sending us a copyrighted photo. Thank you for your support!