austraLasia #2696
 
Aus-Pac website morphs into a beauty to behold

MELBOURNE: 20 August 2010 -- August 19th was slated as 'makeover' day for the Australia-Pacific website.  And so it has come to pass, at least if one reads the laconic "All Salesians of the province and friends are invited to come along to the launch of the new province website" line on the site's calendar entry for that day. The website came into being several years back and was already a major step forward in the web 2.0 direction, but the energetic efforts of the Social Communications Team under the leadership of Fr Will Matthews has made it better yet again, and almost entirely 'homegrown' this time, in the sense that it has been 'brought in from the cold' of outsourcing to the province hearth.  By all means go to www.sdb.org.au (don't forget the au otherwise you go to the other recently morphed wonder to behold!) and see for yourself.
    We often - speaking of the Congregation's website team - receive requests of the 'how to' kind, and this requires some explanation not just of content but of how to translate that into a coherent and user-friendly design that is web-appropriate.  By no means an easy task.  So, from people who know something about this, and that includes knowing just how much work has to go into the design side of things, warm congratulations to Will and his team. We can now confidently add this website to the list of those we send people who ask some of the 'how to' questions.
    No website is ever finished, indeed no website should ever be finished! The real test of a good website is constant updating of materials, shifts in design to suit shifting tastes and needs. This was one of the reasons why the Aus-Pac team chose (it seems) to use an established base... one doesn't see the word 'Joomla' anywhere, and most might not even suspect it, but it probably has that base, and this is one of the achievements, to give the site its homegrown identity while using a platform that will continue to develop and offer new opportunities to this identity.
    We believe there are other sites in the Region working on major makeovers. Recent conversation with Japan suggests that next month may see a major move there too. Don't forget to let us know of any new sites, new URLs in the region so they can be represented both in Bosconet and in sdb.org.
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