Dear Aura’s House Friends and Supporters,

As you no doubt have noticed, we’ve recently changed our look. I figured after nearly five years of the Aura’s House website, it was time to make it more organized, more functional, more interactive, and more worth visiting on a daily basis.

Me reminding everyone that it's 2009.

 
Back in 2003 when I first started the Aura’s House site, everything was designed from scratch and it took months to put together. After the site finally launched on June 30, 2004, it was only meant for one project and one project only; to raise $4500 to buy a brick home for my sponsored child, Aura Yesenia Solis Hernandez.

After some convincing from donor turned partner, Anastasia Yecke, I finally decided to keep the site open for other projects after Aura’s home project was successfully completed. The site served us well for many years but it was never designed to accommodate all the content we eventually put on it. In essence it was becoming a sprawling shanty town of a site and very cumbersome to maintain. Thanks to partners Anastasia, Mike Epler, Heather LaBonte, and especially Christina Sidoti who also does web updates, I never would have had the energy to keep our projects up and running.

So, anyhoo… it’s my hope that you enjoy our new look as well as the new features. You can now comment on, email, or print any post or page that you find on the site. You can also share posts via Digg, Facebook, Delicious, etc if you are into that sort of thing. We will soon have (as of Feb. 9, 2009 or so) five projects running at the same time instead of two so you’ll have more choices as to which you’d like to support. When one finishes, we’ll be able to add another more quickly than before. This past week I added a translator for those of you whose first language is not English. Also you can now subscribe to RSS feeds of Aura’s House as content is updated.

Many pages from the old site will still be active and I’m going to continue to add more features and functionality as we go along, such as a community area, forum or chat area, a better donors list/guestbook, a comments wall, etc. If YOU are a web-savvy individual with some ideas for us, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this post or email me at kpalana at aurashouse.com.

Thanks and all the best for 2009! We’ll be launching our new projects soon and will be mailing out our February newsletter shortly.

Cheers,
Kristen
Aura’s House Founder