As I near the end of this rewrite process I thought I'd jot down some of the history of this site (Shoalhaven Heads Community website).

In early 2005 I decided to register a domain name suitable for a local site for the 'Heads. As 'shoalhavenheads plus .com.au (or any variant) wasn't available to register as all geographical names had been reserved by some government body or other, I settled on 'theheads.net.au'.

I used some ideas and pages that I had used to create a reasonably successful community site in Auckland, NZ, to start a site for us here. I managed to get some sponsors/advertisers to support the venture (basically, as now, to help pay for hosting costs) and got things underway.

As with most ventures, I ran out of enthusiasm a little when I found that editing/coding pages and articles etc was just becoming too onerous a task to undertake on a casual, part time basis. So, a year or so later I tried a rewrite using a CMS, or Content Management System. I chose Drupal as it was recommended as a good one to use and for a while all seemed fine. However, I soon ran into snags - my web hosting company didn't help matters either - but in the end it was just too complex to manage and I found myself 'Googling' for answers all the time as the Drupal support community was (and still is apparently) pretty hopeless for a casual user. Geeks were catered for but not me!

So, late last year I discovered WordPress. I'm in love.

While not designed as a CMS, there is a thriving support network out there of people like myself who have also discovered how good it really is - stable, relatively easy to understand and there is also a gigantic amount of 'plug-ins' and 'widgets' and 'themes' to be able to use it effectively for a community site like this one.

I had also managed to grab shoalhavenheads.net.au as a much better domain name to use, hence the change of address. I'll redirect the old site address to this one for a while until Google and all the other 'bots' have found us and people have changed their bookmarks and favourites!

This will probably be my last go at this idea (well, I've said THAT before) so I'm committed to making a good go at it. The features I've already put up are better than the previous site I feel and a lot easier for article contributors to use.

So, anyway, thanks again WordPress and here's to us making it the best community website on the South Coast!
Cheers,
Andy