A few new treats!

No doubt those of you who check the site regularly will have noticed our recent down time (nearly two weeks!). The situation was initially caused by what became daily attempts by spammers to hack the site for their own purposes and the problems this caused not only for us but for our host service providers. Fixing this in itself would have only taken a day or so but we decided to take the opportunity relaunch the site and lay the ground work for a few improvements.

We hope the changes described below are useful and encourage our visitors to engage more readily with the site and move towards a stronger sense of community that will allow us to improve supported volunteering for everyone involved. Here are a few of the main changes that we’ve made:

• New look – hopefully the new look & feel of the site will present an clearer and more useful resource
• Social Sign In – visitors can now register with the site using their favourite social network site such as Facebook, Twitter or Myspace (Yahoo users, please be patient while we work out a few bugs). This will make it easier for you to remember your login details AND help you share information with/from our site.
• You, Us & Twitter - Want to engage us on Twitter? Just click on the Follow Us button on the left hand side of the screen and Bob’s your uncle. There is also a Tweet This button at the top of every blog post just in case you want to tell twitter about something we’ve said.
• Give Feedback Button – there is a new button in the lower right hand corner which will allow you to register any general feedback you may have about the site.

Here are a few of the priority issues that we’re still working on so:

• A better layout for the SV in the News page
• Bringing over all the content from the old site
• Completing the Links Library page

In the meantime, we invite you to (re?)join us and let us know what  you think – about the new site changes and, of course, about supported volunteering!