UPDATE Friday 4:10pm
The new website for White Center www.visitwhitecenter.com is now live and essentially complete. Designer Kathi George said, "We have a couple weird things happening to our flickr feed on a couple pages, We will continue to tweak that (...) we will make minor fixes on things needing more attention."
The site is meant to be a community portal for news, information and resources for people in and outside the area. In a quick look at the site Mikel Davila of the WCCDA said, "So far it looks amazing!"

UPDATE Tuesday 6:00pm

The White Center of Commerce meeting held today offered some further details on the new website that will represent the community. It is set to go live in a soft launch on Sept 12 with the hard launch in more final form likely Friday, Sept. 14.
Designer Kathi George of Noise Without Sound Design spoke about the site at the White Center Chamber of Commerce meeting as did board member Aileen Sison and Brittany Trujillo of Seattle Silk Screening.
They explained that they have done custom photography for each business in the community (other than corporate locations).

They explained that the site was now well more than 275 pages in size and that it was undergoing some last minute tweaks to fix minor issues. George explained that at a meeting Monday evening they chose to list all local news sources with an RSS feed on the home page (this provides a set of text based links to current relevant stories).

Chamber President Mark Ufkes praised George and the efforts of the team that assembled the site. "Kathi has done at least a $25,000 job on a $10,000 budget." He reviewed the history of the site's development explaining that the money came from a grant from the Seattle Office of Economic Development.

Original Post
The website that will represent White Center officially www.visitwhitecenter.com, is nearly done but not without a certain measure of controversy in getting there. The original design featured a highly stylized artistic drawing of a rat, and the phrase "Kick it in Rat City" a very clear concession to the nomenclature the area has had for decades.

But many objected, even after it was explained that the name supposedly had its roots in a former military training area, or that in many cultures rodents are honored. In the end there were seven businesses that asked to not participate because of the rat. Four others expressed they did not like the rat but still wanted to participate.

When rolled out, possibly as soon at this week the site will feature a business directory with each business listed unless they specified otherwise. Those listings include at least one photo.

Also listed are: hours, address, phone, website, email address, a map, fun facts and what languages are spoken.

There are five categories in the directory, helping people instantly navigate to what they are looking for. They are: Eat, Play, Shop, Services & Orgs.

For now the organizations do not have photos, but that is planned for later inclusion. Churches are also planned for in an update.

Also on the site are:
• Links to each news organization covering the area.
• A Google Map Tour of all the murals around the neighborhood. You can see them online or print it out and take a self-guided tour.
• A link to a new Flickr account featuring images of White Center.
• The play section, which contains the parks in the area.
• A history section that with an update of What White Center is like now.
• The story behind R.A.T. City.
• A section about the White Center Chamber of Commerce.
• An events section.

Still being planned is a "public art tour," featuring photos and a map of all the public art in White Center set up to illustrate where it is and some information about it. That will appear later this month or early in October.

Some limited advertising will be allowed to help maintain the site/business listings since they can change as businesses grow, change hands or come and go.