Community Site in a Box for CGDNs

Posted by Leonie Dunbar on 5 October 2010

A lot of community groups around Australia agree that a website for their town would be greatly beneficial for both residents and visitors to that community. They want the website but find the idea of building a website daunting, worry about the costs and whether or not they have the ability to create and maintain a website themselves. These fears often prevent community groups from moving forward into the digital age and getting their town online but we are here to help! This is why we’ve developed a special, low-cost website development tool called Community Site in a Box (CSIAB).

CSIAB is a ‘turn-key’ content management system that has been designed for use by people with any level of computer skills and is very easy to use. When a CGDN holder decides to use CSIAB, the website is automatically created for them using one of many changeable templates and includes a Directory, News and Events section and a Home Page. The community has the ability to add, change and delete as many pages and sections as they like depending on what suits their town. Other features include an advertising facility, ability to issue email addresses at the domain name, such as. johnsmith@carlton.vic.au, web traffic statistics, incorporation of RSS feeds and so on.

The community can then login to the system online from any computer and add custom images to individualise the look of the site as well as begin adding content and information relevant to the community. As information is added to the system, it automatically appears on the website – it is that easy! Unless of course the community doesn’t want information displayed just yet in which case there is a disable option.

The community group who manages the site has the ability to create customised roles – so that different people and or groups can have different access permissions – down to any level – even down to a single directory listing. For example, a particular organisation can be responsible for updating their own details without being able to access any other parts of the site – this can help enormously with sharing the load of seeking and uploading content.

One of our main priorities when we developed CSIAB was to keep the costs to an absolute minimum - knowing too well that many community groups have limited funding. The system is available for $99inc GST per year which includes hosting, making this is a very cheap option.

Some examples of great CSIAB websites include www.carlton.vic.au, www.lobethal.sa.au, www.burrumiver.qld.au

[caption id="attachment_123" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="CSIAB Website Examples"]CSIAB Website Examples[/caption]

For more information on CSIAB including a link to live CSIAB websites see: http://www.cgdn.org.au/siteinabox/