About KC Dance (archived page from 1999)
Who
KCDance.Com is a production of Michael Strong. That's me.
The site is designed for one person to run. I have often been confused as a dance studio. I am not. I'm just a regular person who has a site. This isn't a business, in case you were intent on selling to me. I do make a small amount of money with some text ads run from Google (almost enough to cover my hosting charges). Other than that all the expenses and time have come from me since the beginning in 1997.
I have a grab-bag dump-things-into site at http://www.aameps.com where you can find my personal web pages. Or you can more directly get to my personal pages at http://www.aameps.com/dancer. I normally try to keep myself off my KCDance site. I regard it in much the same way as I regarded my newspaper coverage in upstate New York in the 70's - that is: as a way of delivering other person's needs and stories and concerns, not my own.
Dancing
In early 1997, at
the Kansas City Swing Dance Club, I found early on
that my fellow dancers had only a handful of nightclubs and other places
where they knew they could dance. It was the same for places to learn to dance.
At first I wrote a half-page of information that I would take with me to
hand out. As I began to expand the list I decided it would be handier for more
people if I added this information as a page on my web site.
That made it easy to get to for web-connected dancers.
Still, for a while, before going out dancing,
I would print a number of the newest web pages and take them with me as a bundle
so that I could give the information to persons who came up to us looking for somewhere
they could go to learn to dance.
Where To Go
By this time I was going out to a number of locations
and I wanted to expand my list. Even the most experienced
dancers at the clubs didn't have a really good list of nightspots to go to
for dancing. None of the local news sources were any help. The Kansas City
Star's Friday (now Thursday) "Preview" section carried a night life section as did the Pitch
Weekly but neither one could tell you where the dancing was.
It grew steadily as I found more and more places which
had dance floors, or offered dancing or allowed dancing in some other way.
By fall of 1997 I decided to turn my information page
into a brochure that I could hand out. I kept adding to the site.
So far it was still a branch of my personal site.
Domain Name
In the spring of 1998 hosting charges for a domain name became low enough and the cost of a domain name became low enough that I could afford to get a domain and to pay for hosting. I was fortunate to find that "kcdance.com" was available. Since then KCDance.Com has continued to expand.