About Us
Read our story below.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 22 years since Dan Webster IV, a fourth generation Baysider, decided it would be fun to gather the email addresses of a few Bayside friends and ask if they wanted to receive a special treat in their mailboxes each day from him. The experiment was meant as a way to keep our tight-knit summer community more connected through the long “off-season.” On January 31, 2001, Dan sent out the very first Bayside Picture-of-the-Day (POTD). You can see that photo here. The photos were distributed in much lower resolution back then because, as many will recall, AOL dial-up service didn’t offer very much bandwidth.
Dan Webster and Favorite Bayside Lifeguard Sue Brown
Dan and Lisa Webster Camping on Bald Rock
The list of interested Baysiders grew, and grew, and Dan began to supplement the POTDs with special notices and reminders, like upcoming meeting notices and social event dates, Village and Town meeting minutes, and, once in a while, a note about a lost or found dog or cat or boat. With the help of many talented amateur and professional Bayside photographers (thank you!), submissions for the POTD morphed from the boring photos of the local cottages that Dan and his wife, Lisa, would take each summer, to spectacular photos of sunsets and sunrises, rainstorms and rainbows, wharf jumps and tugs-of-war, sailing races and sailing students, and special photos of the moments of our lives, like graduations, weddings and new baby Baysiders.
The Bayside calendar was launched in 2002. It was a pretty simple affair back then, just a page or two, emailed and posted on the local bulletin boards all summer-long by Dan and Lisa (but mostly Dan). By 2022, the calendar weighed in at over 20 pages and 340 entries. No wonder the summers feel so busy.
More and more people reached out to join the email list, and it became clear that it would be useful to gather all the important (and fun) information in one place as opposed to clogging inboxes, and so the BaysideMaine.com website was launched in 2003. Not much changed over the years, including the pretty bad color scheme and the not-so-easy-to-navigate tabs, although Dan always hoped to find time to rebuild the site.
The Webster Family
Dan and Lisa Webster
As for many of you, the pandemic months gave Dan some free time…time he needed to drag BaysideMaine.com into the 21st century. And so, on January 31, 2021, the 20th anniversary of launching the Bayside Picture-of-the-Day, this new, updated BaysideMaine.com website was launched! You should find it easy to navigate, with handy links to all the important information our users have come to rely upon, answers to commonly asked questions, like where to buy those trash stickers and when does sailing school start, and a treasure chest of all the past POTDs, since 2001, an invaluable way to look back fondly on our magical summers in Bayside and “remember when.”
Many thanks to advisory committee members Al Zayac, Ben Webster, and Steve Nelson for their contributions of technical and design help, insight, and feedback, as they worked together with Dan to launch this new site for the Bayside community, and to Maddie Smit for supplying the artwork for our logo.
We may not have everything right, so your feedback on this “work in progress” would be very much appreciated. Email Dan.
In the meantime, ENJOY!!
Sally Trenholm and Dan Webster on the Wharf
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