This article appeard in the New Jersey Section of the New York Times on February 1, 1998

Coastal Webmaster

A Shore-Struck Boy Grew Up to Share His Love on the Internet

By Bill Kent

Urban LeJeune was captivated by Atlantic City when he was 6. Now his web site spreads information about the city around the world.

Urban LeJeune has loved Atlantic City since he was 6, although that's not why he created the "I Love Atlantic City" World Wide Web site www.ILoveAC.com, which he says is among the busiest sites in the state.

A former professor of computer science at Stockton State College in Pomona, Mr. LeJeune still remembers the summer when his father took the family from North Jersey to the Boardwalk.

"I was mesmerized," he said. "This was like nothing I'd ever seen anywhere. We'd be in the car, driving south for hours, and then he'd take that turn east, and all of a sudden, rising up from the marshes, were all these hotels connected by a big, wide Boardwalk. I was overwhelmed by it all."

The web site he designed, with more than 500 virtual pages and links to 6,000 other sites, is just as mesmerizing and overwhelming as the city of his youth. "I'm 65, and quite a bit has happened to me between that first visit to Atlantic City and spring of 1997, when I set up the page," he said. "I've been on the Internet for 12 years, back before there was a Web. I've written three books about the Internet. I've designed close to 100 web sites. Most importantly, I've connected with the culture of the Internet, so I know what people tend to be looking for on the Internet and how people who want to be found on the Internet can get their message out."

But he added: "I wanted the web site to appeal to me first. I like being dazzled. I like vitality. I like learning something new. I like history. I like interesting stuff. I like activity, and I like interacting. I like getting something for nothing. All those things happen in the real Atlantic City. It follows that a web site should at least approximate those experiences."

To be sure, he has his competitors, on and off the Web.In a town whose technological achievements peaked in 1891 with William J. Somers's invention of the "observation round-about," a precursor of the Ferris wheel, Atlantic City has become a boom town for Web-spinners. They have fashioned distinct sites for City Hall, the Miss America pageant, the Public Library, Atlantic County, the Atlantic City Visitors and Convention Authority, a few restaurants and eight of the city's dozen casino hotels. (All of those sites are linked to Mr. LeJeune's Atlantic City web site.)

But Mr. LeJeune, who had worked for Bell Labs in Murray Hill before teaching at Stockton, is among the lucky few with track records. He previously created tourism-oriented web sites for Bucks County, Pa., and for Long Beach Island in Ocean County, which, on a lark, he decided to call "I Love LBI." Mr. LeJeune, who lives in Little Egg Harbor Township, said he modeled his Atlantic City page on Long Beach Island's.

"I got into this because I wanted a business in which I could work while on vacation," he said. "The beauty of the Internet for the entrepreneur is that aside from the occasional need to meet clients face to face, it really doesn't matter where you live, how you dress or what hours you keep. It's perfect for someone like me, who has never really enjoyed working for anyone but himself. My kids are all grown and on their own. For the last four years it's been me, my wife and my laptop. If there's a power failure, I sit in the dark and whine until the lights come back on."

Local restaurants, room reservation services and classified advertisements helped the page pay for itself by last summer, but Mr. LeJeune has received no sponsorship from the casinos themselves.

He said "I Love Atlantic City," the busiest web site he has created, is visited about 1,200 times a day, with half the visitors looking for tourism-related information like weather, casino news, restaurant reviews, entertainment listings, hotel room availability and discounts from local merchants. Mr. LeJeune has also used the site to raise money for the Atlantic City Boys and Girls Club and Jersey Shore Big Brothers and Big Sisters.

The site's visitors, who Mr. LeJeune said have hailed from as far-away as Japan and Indonesia, are part of what he calls the "interactive community."

"They're surfing around and something in the site has caught their eye," he said, "and now they want to have some fun, get something for free or watch something do tricks.

"They get that in the real Atlantic City. They should get something similar from me."

Copyright 1998, the New York Times.

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