About the Halswell Website

I’ve recently read some comments on the website and realise that many people don’t know how it developed and where it came from, so here is a little run down of its beginnings and how it runs now.

The photo is Hugh Donald. Hugh is the current webmaster for our website (www.halswellcommunity.net.nz), and he does all that work completely voluntarily.

The Halswell website was initially launched in March 2012 and was built to supplement the newsletter. This newsletter got started in mid 2010 and back then, Halswell had a tiny presence on Facebook (unlike now!), so it was much harder to get the word out to Halswell people. 

Building the website was a mission for someone who had no background in Web Development (me) but without the considerable money it takes to get professional developers to do it, there wasn’t much choice.  

The website was built using Joomla which is free software, and we installed free templates and other free components etc.  

 The Halswell Residents Association paid for the first two years of webhosting and our domain name and these costs were taken over by the Halswell Community Project which was set up in 2013.  These expenses are now covered by some of the business advertising that appears on the site.

Hugh came on board in December 2015.  He noticed that much of the information on the website was out of date and emailed, offering to assist. Since that time he has been the main man on our website and he has been incredibly generous with his time.  On a completely voluntary basis, he has learned his way through the programme that the website uses and then took on rebuilding the site in 2017.  He has continued to update and manage the site with a little help from a few of us at the Halswell Community Project.  If that is not enough, he has branched out to help other community groups with their websites, and does a number of other community focused activities.

Development of the website is ongoing and we're keen to get other people involved in maintaining and possibly even developing it.   We've recently changed the template that we use to try and make the site more cell phone friendly.  The upgrade has helped, but it looks like some more work is needed to make it work better

We would love to have one or two other people help out with the website.  Hugh has developed a great set of instructions and “how-to”s, and most of the work updating the site is quite simple.

Please check any information that is up there for your community group or business and make sure it is up to date.  If it is not, then let us know what has changed so we can update it.

The best way to get in touch is via the contact form on the website at www.halswellcommunity.net.nz

Chrys Horn (HCP)