Website

Your New General Service Website

Background

Brooklyn County:

The Brooklyn County Website originally started back in March 2007. The first idea was a website for the Brooklyn County Share A Day which the county agreed to and implemented. brooklyncountyshareaday.org was the first website and it was a success which inspired the county to continue the site but going forward it would become brooklynaa.org and serve the whole county rather than just the share a day.

SENY

At SENY Committee Meetings past the plan was put forward for the SENY Web Committee to build websites for those Counties which were without a General Service website and/or link to the websites that were already in existence. The new websites would be built on a WordPress™ platform. SENY’s website runs on a Joomla™ 2.5 platform, which will be upgraded to a Joomla 3 platform. WordPress and Joomla both make building and maintaining websites a lot easier (and potentially cheaper) than building the sites from scratch or using fairly expensive software like Dreamweaver.

Appearance

This site uses a free WordPress theme plus a few plug-ins. For instance, the “print / save as PDF” buttons are an example of a plug-in that is visible to you. The same goes for the calendar. There are limits when you use free stuff, and the ability to tweak the site’s appearance to our satisfaction is sorely constrained. For the time being, however, it’ll do.

A word about the site’s gorgeous logo and rational structure. These were poached wholesale from Suffolk County’s General Service website, http://aasuffolkgs-ny.org; only the colors were changed. Ditto for the disclaimer & web guidelines (there, “Suffolk County” was replaced with “Brooklyn”. I got permission, though, from Suffolk County’s web chair, John J.

Upcoming

Expect to see this site evolve over time. Input from the SENY Web Committee, which meets monthly at the SENY office in the south Bronx near a bakery that serves delicious coffee and pretty decent doughnuts, will find their way onto this site. The Contacts page will exchange its TBAs for real names – sooner rather than later. I can see individual General Service standing committees making use of their own separate blog posting pages to publish announcements, articles and such. I haven’t found a free theme that supports more than a single posting page yet. But WordPress has an intimidating selection of free themes, plus those you can buy as well.

Once we know who are the current committee chairs and DCMs, they will have authorization to post events and other announcements directly to the website. In the meantime, please email me, your web committee chair, at webchair@brooklynaa.org with your requests, & contributions. These can be stories, pictures, flyers (if possible, attach them as PDFs), announcements, opinions & suggestions.  Don’t forget to include your contact information, including phone number. This is your website.

Visit this site often. New stuff shall appear as it arrives.

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