New User Information

If you are new to the site, or if you have never been to Iowa’s Great River Road, then we are excited to share with you the many wonderful opportunities for fun, adventure, history and recreation that we have to offer. 

Here are a few quick tips to help make your visit to the Web site more useful and easy.

Register The first thing you should do is register. It only takes a few seconds and it unlocks all of the many tools, itineraries and features of the site. Just click HERE TO REGISTER. (We will not share your information with anyone.)   Registering on this Web site makes many extremely powerful and helpful tools available to you, including our unique and exclusive Itinerary Planner as well as saving favorites, sending content to friends and building your own unique resource page, where you can review your favorites, upload documents of your own and even communicate with other members of the Iowa Great River Road Web site. We promise that it will make your visit to the Web site far more valuable and it will be a great tool for planning your next trip to the Iowa Great River Road.

Next you will want to take a quick peek at a few important tools on the site:

Search Categories and Directories All of the content on the Iowa Great River Road Web site is organized under the convenient drop-down menus across the top of every page. Simply roll over the menu headings, such as River Cities or Directory, and all available sub-pages under that heading will be visible. Simply scroll down and click on the page that interests you.   Note that in some instances, even the pages with drop-down links beneath them may also be clickable. Likewise, in some instances, some of the drop-down pages may have sub-pages of their own. You can discover these pages by simply moving your mouse through the drop-down list and rolling over each clickable page to see if it reveals additional pages.

Turbo Search Well, talk about cutting to the chase! The Turbo Search function does just what it says. While you can choose to spend as much time as you like browsing the ever-growing content of the Iowa Great River Road Web site, this tool allows you to very quickly and easily select (with a simple checkmark) all the communities and areas of interest on the site that are relevant to your trip or purpose for visiting the site, and have every story, event and directory venue relevant to the search displayed conveniently on one page. Vóila! This a super-quick way to filter content when looking for items to add to your favorites or to one of your upcoming itineraries. Like visiting the Iowa Great River Road itself, we think that a leisurely stroll through the Web site is the most fun way to experience it, but we understand that sometimes people are in a hurry. That is why the Turbo Search was created.

Save, organize and send site content   Welcome to the real power of the Iowa Great River Road Web site. After registering and logging in, you can now interact with every piece of content on the site. As you browse stories, events and venues, such as museums, restaurants and hotels, you can make choices with what to do with those pieces of site content.   E-mail to a Friend - As it says, you can send the content of anything you read to a friend. Share interesting tidbits you discover or make a suggestion to someone who will be joining you on the Iowa Great River Road vacation. Simply click the "E-mail to a friend" button above any content you are reading.   Add to My Resources - Once you are a member, you will have a My Resources page all your own. Everything saved on this page will be done by you. Of the many ways you can add content to this "Favorites" page, the most popular is to click the "Add to My Resources" button located above every content posting. This will add that story, event or location to your My Resources page for later quick-reference.   Add to My Itinerary - Are you planning a trip along the Iowa Great River Road? My Itinerary is going to be your best friend in making your plans. Simply create an itinerary. An easy way to do this is to click the "Add to My Itinerary" button. In the pop-up window that appears, you will be able to click the "Create New" button. Name your itinerary and then simply click the button. The item is now added to that itinerary. Continue adding all the stories, events and locations you like to your itinerary. You can even create multiple itineraries at the same time, in case you are planning multiple Iowa Great River Road trips, allowing you to discover different areas of the river at different times. On your My Itinerary page, you can view any of the items you have selected, or delete them, and you can choose to view them all in one big list with more details showing, This will be convenient for printing out the list to take with you on your trip. You'll have all the phone numbers, addresses and little details you will need to make your trip fun and without frustration.

Google Maps Each Community on the Iowa Great River Road Web site has an interactive Google Map embedded at the bottom of the community page. Even more helpful, the Maps page, located under the Home & Info drop-down menu, has even larger versions of each community's interactive map, as well as one for the entire region, and even a special Attractions Map that shows where many of the Iowa Great River Road's biggest attractions are located up and down Iowa's eastern edge. Click here to visit the Maps page now.

Publishing Content to the Web site Everyone is able to contribute content to the Iowa Great River Road Web site. You do not need to be registered to contribute. The real strength of this site is its ability to collect the stories of the people who live on, visit and simply love the Mississippi and the oportunities that present themselves along its banks. You may submit your relevant stories, promote your community events and even list your tourism-based business for Web site visitors to discover when they visit the site. All content posted to the site is moderated, therefore no postings will appear instantly. The staff of the IowaGreatRiverRoad.com Web site will review, edit if necessary, and make sure all content is being posted to the correct areas. Approval of all content is subject to the editorial discretion of the Web site staff. They will attempt to ensure that all postings are verified as correct, but as it is not always possible, the honor system will do some governing, assuming that the content you post is accurate and relevant. Your events should appear online within a couple days of posting, though in many cases much sooner.       Publish Events   Events are experiences that have dates associated with them. For example, Effigy Mounds itself is not an event, but a demonstration of Native American hunting by a visiting scholar is a valid event. Simply being open for business is not an event, but a concert at a venue is. Places that are open daily or regularly are locations. Those should be posted to the Directory (see below). Events expire when they are over. Though some events have many dates associated with them, they will eventually all come and go and at that time will disappear from the Web site.   Under the Home & Info drop-down category, scroll down to Publish. Three publishing options will pop-out to the right. Choose "Publish Event" by clicking on it. Fill out the form's data boxes as thoroughly as possible.   Title   Give your event a brief and concise title -- likely, the name of your event. Don't include extra text like subtitles that describe the event.   Body   Please be sure to put descriptive content in both the Event Summary window and the Body field. The Event Summary field is the teaser text that shows up with the event when it appears in the events list. Essentially, this is the text that "sells" the reader on clicking to get more information. For most shorter event postings, it is acceptable and suggested that you simply cut and paste the same content into both fields. If there are more than about 200 words in your event posting, it is suggested that you copy and paste just the first paragraph from the posting into the Event Summary field, but you are welcome to write whatever you like to best promote your event.   Be as descriptive and wordy as you like in the body copy. Note that there are extensive design tools at your disposal above the Body field. Depending on your knowledge and experience with word processing and even Web site design, you can use as many or as few of these tools as you wish. They will allow you to add color to your text, change font sizes, add hotlinks and even embed larger photos into your story. (You will be asked to upload an image to go with the event a little later. This is all that is needed for a quality event posting, so don't feel obligated to embed images in the event posting. You don't even have to use a photo with your event if you don't have one. Be reasonable with your design choices. When the event is moderated before publishing, if it has crazy fonts, huge text or pictures that are clearly too big for easy viewing, the event may be deleted. We suggest you do not change the font from the default for the sake of site continuity. If you use tables, do not set table widths in pixels, but use percentages and stay at 100% or below.   Image/Caption   This is where you can upload an image that goes with your event and also acts as its thumbnail image. Choose a logo or a photo that best represents the event posting. Upload JPEG or PNG file formats. All images will be automatically scaled for use on the site, so there is no need to pre-size the image, though we suggest all images be less than one (1) Megabyte before attaching. The smaller the image file's size, the faster it goes. If you choose to attach an image (you do not have to), you can type in a caption for the image or leave it blank if it is not necessary.   Attach File   This is not needed for most postings, but in the event that you have a document you would like to post along with the event, like a registration form, a PDF brochure, etc., you can do it here. Please keep the attachments relatively small. Large attachments may be rejected or they may upload very slowly. You can also put a caption on this file. We suggest you do, such as "Click to download the brochure."   Name & E-mail   This is your personal information. We want YOUR name, not the name of the event. These two fields will not be made public, but may be used by the Web site staff to contact you if we have questions about the posting or need more information to complete the posting. It is for inter-office use only, so please tell us who you are and how to contact you. We'd hate to delete your event just because you forgot to tell us what time of day it is happening.   Location   This is where the event is happening. The name of the venue and a physical street address if possible.   Time   This is the time of day, not the day of the week. So this is where you might type "10 a.m. - 2 p.m.," for example. If the event has multiple dates and is at different times on different days, you can either use this space to say something like "7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. on Sundays," or you may choose to list more complex dates and times in the Body of the posting, and simply put "See the event description for times" in this space.   Dates for the events   This is where you select the days the event takes place. Usually it's one day. All you have to do is use the calendar tool and click on the day your event is happening. The day will turn orange when it is selected. Select as many days as necessary to fulfill the event's needs. You can also use the arrows to scroll ahead months at a time in case your event is more than two months away, or if it is, for example, on the third Thursday of every month. In that event, you could choose to keep scrolling ahead and post the event on the corresponding day of the month for a year or more in advance. That means you could post 10, 20 or 50 future events with one posting. How convenient!   Select Categories   This is VERY important. This decides where the event gets seen. Click the + symbol next to the interest category in which you want the event posted. Then place a checkmark in each box where the event belongs. It may very well belong in multiple places. This gives your event even more of an opportunity to be seen. For example, a music festival with food  in Muscatine, Iowa, might be listed under River Cities/Muscatine as well as Things to Do/Food and Dining, Things to Do/Nightlife and Stories to Tell/Music. Do not abuse the location posting tool. If the event is in Dubuque, it does NOT get posted to Bellevue, even if they are neighboring cities. Really over-placed events will be deleted for abuse. Web site staff often choose to expand the placement of events' postings when approving events, so feel free to place the event only where you are positive it belongs. We have the site well-memorized and will know if there are places it should be where it is not yet listed.   Submit / Finish   When you are done simply click Submit. Do not look for the event. It will not appear until it has been approved by a site administrator. When the page reloads to an empty page, you are free to move on. You can also click the Create Another button instead of Submit. This will submit the event and bring you back to an empty form to post another event. If you don't click one of the two buttons at the bottom of the page, your event will not be posted.       Publish Feature Articles   Feature articles are the stories of the people, places and things that give the Iowa Great River Road its aura. These are stories that do not expire. A festival, no matter how big, is not a feature article. A location, like a restaurant, is not a feature article, unless there is a real story written about the venue. Simply listing a business, even if there are significant details about the location, should happen in the directory. No content that will be dated or irrelevant in the foreseeable future should be posted as a feature.   We would love to hear your stories of life and activity along the road. Do you have stories of historical characters that affected the mighty Mississippi and its communities? Have you had a meal at a place that was simply unforgettable? Tell us about it. Chances are, if you found it worthy of telling your friends about, it's worthy of sharing with the visitors of the Iowa Great River Road Web site.   The Publish Feature tool is located just below the Publish Event link in the Home & Info drop-down category list when you roll over Publish.   The Publish Feature tools work exactly the same as the Publish Event tools, only they are more simplified, as they do not have a calendar, location or time fields. Follow the relevant directions under the Publish Events instructions above and click Submit. It's that easy.       Publish Directory   The Iowa Great River Road Directory is a listing of the places that make  this place such an amazing destination, as well as the resources you'll need as a traveler to have a safe, happy and fulfilling trip down the road.   Once again, the Publish Directory tools work the same as the Publish Event tools, but this time there are more new fields to populate, including supplying Web site links, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. (You may not know the GPS coordinates. That's okay, you can skip that one.)   The Directory Categories are also set up on a different system than the Events and Features Categories. So you'll have to click the + symbol and browse the new options for placing your business or venue into the Directory.

Okay, these are the basics. Now go enjoy the Iowa Great River Road!