about seawaycity.com

SeawayCity.com is a non-commercial website originating from the Seaway City, Cornwall, Ontario, Canada. It serves its online communities as a comprehensive web portal that provides extensive weather information for Cornwall Ontario, the Seaway Valley, and Eastern Ontario.

There are also many links to a variety of local, regional, national, and international news organizations. There are links to websites that provide access to major and local team sports and access to many forms of entertainment.

The SeawayCity.com Web Portal has links that allow you to quickly do searches, provide you with access to provincial lotteries, quick login access to all the major Canadian financial institutions, and access to many local, provincial, and national Canadian and American government agencies.

There are links to major retail and shipping sites, travel sites, fun sites for kids, educational sites, and quick access for bill payments to the major utilities operating in or near the Seaway City in Eastern Ontario. IT’S ALL HERE!

If you know of a website that would be a good fit for SeawayCity.com and others alike, please send us a link request.

History

Inception

SeawayCity.com was founded in 2009. The domain names seawaycity.com and seawaycity.ca were both registered on February 24, 2009 with the .com and .ca top-level domain registries. The domain seawaycity.com is the primary domain, with seawaycity.ca serving as a permanent redirect to it.

Shortly after registration, SeawayCity.com quickly went online and since then, has always been hosted with DataCom Network Services which also operates from the Seaway City in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada.

Design

Original

The original look and feel for SeawayCity.com originated with DataCom which began operating in Cornwall, Ontario as DataCom Bulletin Board Services in 1984. Beginning in 1990, DataCom Online Services was offering internet dial-up services to Cornwall and area. In 2010 the company incorporated as DataCom Network Services Inc. and as seen here, its website mainly served as an online portal for its customers to access a variety of internet online services.

Static

The SeawayCity.com website was originally designed and launched in 2009. Although the framework for the website remained virtually unchanged for more than a decade, minor changes were made from time to time.

The static, one-page design proved to be problematic and constraining when it came time to make any changes. For the most part, we made very little of them.

CMS

Already familiar with the major content management systems (CMS), like Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, and Wix, SeawayCity.com opted to use WordPress, which currently powers more than one-third of all websites on the internet.

While preserving much of the look and feel of the old site, we were able to successfully integrate our existing weather engine to work with WordPress. We are excited to now have the ability to more easily bring you new content that we hope you will enjoy throughout the years to come.

Features

Scenes

Throughout the years, SeawayCity.com has proudly showcased the natural beauty of the Seaway Valley through the lens of the late Dean Ducas of Cornwall. His remarkable talent for capturing light, landscape, and life along the St. Lawrence brought a unique warmth and authenticity to our site.

As an avid canoeist, Dean often viewed the world from just a few feet above the water. That distinctive vantage point shaped his photography, drawing attention to reflections, shifting light, shoreline silhouettes, and the subtle beauty found beneath piers and along quiet riverbanks. His deep appreciation for nature, travel, and landscape photography was evident in every image he shared.

For more than a decade, Dean’s photography appeared behind the SeawayCity.com logo at the top of the website, within what was then a 978-pixel header, becoming a familiar and defining feature of the site. Great care has always been taken to display only local Seaway Valley scenes.

Today, his work is presented predominantly in high resolution within an animated slider at the top of the site’s main content area, where his photography remains one of the featured visual elements of the SeawayCity.com Web Portal.

We remain deeply grateful for his generosity in sharing his photography with our community. His images continue to inspire and will always be an important part of our story.

To explore more of Dean’s beautiful work and celebrate his life, please visit his memorial page, In Memoriam: deanspic, on Flickr.

Weather

The weather is a primary feature that draws visitors to SeawayCity.com. It consists of five parts, and all of them are equally important. They are the “current conditions”, the “forecast”, the “detailed forecast”, the “Air Quality Health Index”, and the “Ontario radar”.

Current conditions

Our current conditions feature offers a comprehensive set of active weather data points. They are wind direction, wind velocity, wind gust, wind chill (winter), heat index (summer), humidity, dew point, pressure, pressure tendency, visibility, an observation of the sky, and if any, the form of precipitation.

It is made available to us, courtesy of the National Weather Service (NWS), which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Their mission is the protection of life and property and the enhancement of their national economy.

The NWS aggregates the data they receive from thousands of meteorology instruments located at airports throughout Canada and the United States, and provides us with the information.

Our customized software converts it to metric, renders the data received into legible text, using a variety of fonts and colours, lines them up with our custom set of life-like weather icons, and then feeds the end result into our content management system (CMS) which is powered by DataCom’s web server, for all our weather enthusiasts to see when they come visit.

Forecast

The data points for our 5-day graphical forecast, and our 7-day detailed text forecast are provided by Environment Canada (EC). Updates are received four and sometimes, five times per day. Our software seamlessly handles the day/night transitions based on our timezone, and again, here it goes through the same process as with the current conditions. Only the source, (EC instead of NWS), is the primary difference.

The Detailed Weather Forecast will also display extreme weather advisories when issued by Environment Canada for Cornwall and the Seaway Valley.

 

 

Ontario radar

One of our most colourful features on SeawayCity.com can, at times, be the Ontario weather radar. Here in the office, we refer to it as “NEXRAD”, which stands for Next-Generation Radar, a network of 160 high-resolution S-band Doppler weather radars operated by the NWS. The technical name is WSR-88D (Weather Surveillance Radar, 1988, Doppler). The radar images seen on SeawayCity.com are provided by Accuweather.com.

The Ontario radar seen below was in its full glory when captured on March 10, 2021. As rarely seen, here we have a mix of all the forms of precipitation with their varying degrees of intensity.

Air quality health index

Beginning in March 2023, Canada was affected by a record-setting series of wildfires which caused unprecedented levels of smoke, forcing air quality alerts and evacuations in Canada and the United States. SeawayCity.com now includes a link to the Air Quality Health Index which is made available by Environment Canada.

Links

What makes SeawayCity.com a web portal, is ALL the links. It is our “go-to section” that visitors who come here really like, because IT’S ALL HERE! So spread the word! If there is something that isn’t here, we have that covered too, right here!

News headlines

The news headlines on SeawayCity.com are selected and reported by CBC News, which is the news division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, responsible for producing news programs across various platforms, including television, radio, and online. It provides local, national, and international news coverage and is the largest news broadcaster in Canada. The headlines are provided to us via an RSS feed, which is updated several times during the day and features the top ten stories happening right now in Canada and around the world.

This day in history

Our newest content offering on SeawayCity.com is this day in history, where we display events, births, and deaths, all of which have occurred on this day in history.

It is one of a kind feature that does not exist any where else and which includes a huge searchable database that we have curated throughout the years. The initial data dump that we were provided contained some errors and requires ongoing corrections. Our initial challenge was to import the volume of data into our MySQL database and massage it in such a way as to adhere to the format required made possible by our customized CMS plugin we use to display the information to our website visitors on a daily basis. Please use the following link to report any errors.

Tweets @seawaycity

We currently don’t have a big social media presence, but we recently created a Facebook page and activated our Twitter feed, to which you can tweet @seawaycity. At the moment, we are following the City of Cornwall. We will undoubtedly be following more in the future. If you are in the Seaway City, have a Twitter feed, and would like us to follow you and post your tweets on SeawayCity.com, please feel free to contact us. Of course, feel free to follow us as well.

SeawayCity.com timeline

The following is a summary of SeawayCity.com highlights in the years that they have occurred.