South Auckland/Counties Chapter Editorial

Editorial: The first in an occasional series by Chapter webmaster, John Nickolls
23rd March 2002

This is an experiment. 

I've been publishing the Chapter web site for almost 2 years now, and it's largely my own work, so I have my own personal view of the site.  But I've recently 'stood back' and thought about what the site is for, and who it serves, and it was an interesting exercise.

When I started to set up the web page I didn't really have a plan, and I had no real focus.  After a few days of furious typing I had a rough outline, which we still have, more or less today.  But who exactly was I aiming at?  Well, very loosely everyone, but especially our hosted students. 

The initial vision was of an information and entertainment site for the hosted student, and one that each student could share with friends and family ‘back home’ – a link between countries.  Remember that the Internet is truly global, and most sites, including ours, can be accessed at any time – 24/7 as the Americans have taught us to say. 

A look at the site statistics reveals a huge list of countries accessing our site,
New Zealand leads the ranking, for various reasons, but following us comes:
 

And I’ve had to leave some out – variations on US sites and some ‘Unknowns’ for example.  It’s true that some of the later countries listed have only registered a single ‘hit’, but what a range nevertheless!!

I certainly don’t want to turn my back on the world, and I’ll try to keep an international audience in mind, but I’m also conscious that I have to cater for a much more local following too.

In the coming months I plan to clean up the site to make navigation easier (I have already started), and also want to showcase local publicity and achievement (that’s already started too).  Hosted students will be as prominent as ever, but I also want to bring in ‘the others’ – our selected students, returnees, host families – that complete the AFS family in and around our chapter. 

For the plan to succeed I need some help, as I can’t be everywhere at once.  Not only do I need photos and articles to publish on the site, I need someone to actually take the pictures and write the items for the local papers in the first place!!  Then we should have a site to be really proud of, and one which the world will flock to look at! 

This is only an experiment, but I would so like it to work!