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Four More Years! July 25, 2005 Last year at this time, we sat here and threatened the end of DCGreeks.com. Our actual four year anniversary coincidentally coincided with a nice dinner and wine-tasting at Mourayo on Saturday night, surrounded by other young Greek adults who were simply there like us with their respective parea enjoying the evening. Now on the first Monday of the start of our fifth year, we are pleased to report that DCGreeks.com will continue, hopefully not just for one year, rather for at least four more years. We’re having fun again with the site, are encouraged by some of its positive effects, and have plans to continue to expand the content we bring to the community here in DC and beyond. We recently were delighted to learn that three couples in the DC area have gotten or are getting married this year and that they met through our member directory. This is encouraging news seeing as we tried hard in the beginning to de-emphasize the “dating site” aspects of DCGreeks.com particularly after wrapping up our bachelor/bachelorette auction in 2002. Not many people associate our site with dating these days but we’ve come to realize that the site has grown enough over four years that there’s room for it to be more of a dating site. One of the reasons we originally started this site in the first place was for local people to meet considering there are many international dating sites devoted to dating Greeks, that while nice to look at, aren’t conducive to making lasting relationships unless you work for the airlines and get free trips across the U.S. and Canada. It astonishes us that we recognize people from the DC area who will post pictures and pay to be subscribers on these other sites but don’t take advantage of the free resource and hundreds of people they could be meeting on DCGreeks.com. Maybe it’s that our member directory doesn’t look like a typical dating sites member directory. We are planning some changes in the coming months to allow those who are looking for more than just friends to find others in the area and beyond. (Note: This doesn’t mean that our non-single audience doesn’t have a place on our member directory or on our site. As we’ll mention below, we’re glad that we have such a diverse Greek young adult audience in different stages of their lives visiting this site.) After four years, its time that we embrace the fact that part of this site is focused on dating (and hopefully eventually marriage) and to stop apologizing for it. Our second trip to Clearwater in two years and the continued national draw of YAL DC Weekend has made us relax our almost exclusive focus on the DC area. An important part of the Greek-American experience that separates us from non-ethnic Americans is our destination conferences that allow us to meet other Greek Americans and compare how Greek life is in different parts of the country. We are looking forward to bringing coverage from the 2nd Annual Opa Las Vegas & Greek Festival Trip in late September and from The Greek Cruise to Nassau and Cococay in January. We plan to actually make it to the AHEPA National Convention next year and hope there is a YAL National Convention as well. When Greeks from DC travel to other Greek events it only helps raise awareness for DC as a destination for Greeks from across the country to come visit and even relocate. Also in the last year we’ve come to realize that if DCGreeks.com is to continue to remain fresh that we’re going to need some help and some different perspectives. We’re happy that not only are we getting newer members and visitors who may have been too young to appreciate DCGreeks.com when it first started, but that our original members continue to visit us even through changes in their lives like marriage and in some cases children. It would be great if we could provide more elements for this portion of our community, and we’ll be looking for more ways to keep this audience interested in this site as well. (DCGreeks.com will naturally grow up as we continue to grow up but it will still cater to the energy brought by the younger adults in our community.) Feel free to contact us if there is anything else you’d like to see represented on this site or if you have anything to contribute. Again, as we embark on our fifth year we would like to thank our visitors, those in the DC area and nationally that organize events, and those in the Greek community who support these events. Our site would be nothing without a living, breathing, Greek community in DC and elsewhere. We look to serve this community better in the next year and hope that we are able to follow through on some of the promises we’ve set forth in this article.
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