Wow – we made it, our new website is live! As anyone who has ever taken on a similar endeavour will tell you – it ain’t easy – and we are all a few years older than when we started! We are very excited at what the new site brings to our work and we have many people to thank.
Reading this, it will also strike you that we are blogging for the first time. We plan to use this channel for our news and also invite guest bloggers on issues close to our heart – this could be homelessness, affordable housing, social enterprise, hospitality, restaurants, coffee etc…. lets see where it takes us….
I hope you’ll take your time to look around and provide some feedback on what you think. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, what we are missing, how easy it is to find the information you need and any other feedback.
The great benefit of the new Word Press template is the ability to edit and change what we are doing to suit our work.
You will see one of the new features is our new google mapping, allowing you to view CafeSmart and DineSmart participants, along with grant recipients and crowdfunding projects, all on the same map.
We’d like to thank a number of people who have played a critical role in this project and have made the new website possible. Robbie Dinte – Robbie stuck up his hand many months ago and offered to lead this redesign project. He has volunteered through the NAB Skilled Volunteering program and done many hours more. He has been a great project overseer and driver and has kept us on course. Jimmy Ling – Jimmy gave the go ahead for this to happen at NAB and made available his team; Ben Cameron – Ben is part of the NAB volunteer team and has done the bulk of the coding, mapping and the tricky nuts and bolts, making the site work and interface with our Salesforce database, Ben has put in the hard yards and we can’t thank him enough; Steve Head and Glenn Wilson – from Ayuda Hosting have been supporting StreetSmart for many years and are now providing the new site with web hosting and tech support; Geeta Buttery – Geeta has played a crucial role in the design, content and database integration and much much more, a huge job which never seemed to end, and in fact hasn’t! Simon Bristow – Simon has been volunteering with StreetSmart for 10 years. In that time he built our two previous websites and maintained and edited both. He has helped to keep StreetSmart online and current. Simon now moves on but we will always be indebted to him for his generous volunteering and guidance with all things tech! Tom, Meredith and Katie at Fauv Design have helped StreetSmart with graphic design for 8 years, and produced all the elements for the new website.
There were others who helped along the way, including Patrick Haralabidis, who we also thank.
A final thank you to the National Australia Bank for their support, making their staff and their skills available through the skilled volunteering program.
We think this marks another step along the StreetSmart journey and we hope you’ll be part of it, helping to impact more people in our communities.
