Many residents are aware that Swan Housing Association has a corporate website, but how many know that there is also a residents website called web4residents? We caught up with Mark Saint our community website developer and asked him to describe this site in greater detail.

So is web4residents a new site?

Not really, originally it was called the tenant-web and was a single page from the main Swan site, but this was only a small collection of links, many of which were no longer really relevant, so I started tinkering with it to turn it into something a little more useful.Initially this was just an improved set of links that I thought might be useful to residents, I’m a Swan resident myself so I used the type of thing I might be looking for as a guideline. Whether that was just a quick link to pay your rent online, through to links to local authorities, travel information, even an online TV guide. This was the original web4residents, it was an improvement, but we still needed something better.

So what happened next?

At that time, although you could download copies of our newsletters there was no real way to search through them for a previous article or piece of information, so I started looking for a way to do this too.

You can still download any of our previous newsletters , but now we also have most of the articles on the site separated into categories similar to those in the issue, and you can use the sites search facility to look for something specific. Recently I have been working on the homepage to make it look and feel more like an on-line copy of the issue

So what else is there?

Well lately I have been working with Kari Ann and Abdullah from the Community Investment Team to improve the information on Resident Involvement , we have a better archive for things like the Resident Consultative Committee minutes, an event calendar that shows what meetings are coming up, and we are currently working on the Community News section including articles on success stories, showing residents how their involvement can improve local communities.

You mention resident involvement and that this is a residents website, is there any way residents can get involved in this too?

Yes of course, our whole goal is to make this site and the issue pretty much inseparable. So we are encouraging the resident’s editorial panel to also help us make improvements to the site, through their feedback , and suggestions . We even ask them which of the latest newsletter items we should lead with on the website, as what works best for a newsletter does not always coincide with what is best on a website.
We are also always happy to receive comments, contributions and feedback from any resident who visits the site, and have a contact form in the Contact Us section of the site.

So when will it be finished?

Mark laughs…. ‘Never! The important thing about a site like this is that there is always something that can be added, more news, more useful links, and of course things can always be improved.