By Jerry Davis –

There’s a first for everything.  First day of school, first kiss, first day at summer camp.  As we drove our daughter to college for the first time, we reviewed them all.  She was nervous, so in a wise parental fashion we assured her that the awkwardness dissipates quickly, and strangers become friends almost over night.  After all, everyone has those first-day jitters and everyone wants to get over them.  In a few days, we told her, the fears are gone and any awkwardness is happily forgotten.

But a first blog is forever.  As in: this is my first blog, and it has taken forever to write.  And unlike first day fears, it’s forever.

You see, here at Davis Realty we’ve been engaged in the process of creating a new website.  If you’ve never done this, it’s a fun but fairly Herculean task.

The fun stuff, for me anyway, is the design conversation.  Website design says a lot about who you are and where you’re heading.  It’s like trying on a new suit.  What will people think if I walk in wearing this? Is it me?  So we tried a lot of different looks, working with the great team at MediaBOOM to translate our values and ideals into a visual language.

We eventually landed on a clean, modern visual style, communicating an appreciation for classic New England architecture, and an embrace of technological and ecological progress to improve our community.  We think it fits us pretty well.

Next came putting into words the ideals that have been in our family DNA from the beginning, thanks to my parents, Jack and Helen Davis.  Lifelong believers that you must give back to the community, they had an idea for creating a convenient living option in downtown Madison, and from those beginnings grew Davis Realty.  My brothers and I were brought up with these values, but we never had to sit down and pen them.  Doing so, we found, brought us closer together.

As you’ll see, we have lots of content that we hope will be useful to and enjoyed by all who visit our website.  We’ve tried to make every page reflect our values and the spirit of community that guides us to this day.

No website is all text, thankfully.  Beautiful photography is essential to showing our properties at their best, and shoreline photographer Lisa Bousquet has done amazing work capturing the spirit of our business.

Last though, was the first blog.  I stalled, postponed, procrastinated.  Writers block, I claimed.  But like the first day of school, it can’t be put off.  Hopefully, like everything else, it’s easier the second time.

As for my daughter, she and her new roommate got along famously right away.  What we had expected to be a long goodbye was a quick kiss and a rush back to her new friends.   All jitters were forgotten.

So please check in here soon.  Maybe by then my jitters will be forgotten too!