Sandvox User Profile: paris Grey

Our group, Alabama EARS, is a non-profit organization that has three primary goals: to rescue abandoned rabbits and place them in forever homes, and to educate the public about proper domestic rabbit care and behavior. We need a website flexible enough to meet our goals AND give visitors an atheistically website that they want to revisit. Fund raising is critical for small groups like ours and we rely on donations to keep afloat.

Alabama EARS has had three previous websites in our 10 years. We've used a variety of programs and the last site we had we coded our selves. The website served us well but without any of us being true webmasters, certain issues with coding or java would cause annoying hiccups. We were satisfied with our old site although not thrilled with it and really wanted to make it more interactive and take it to the next level. Our volunteer "webmaster" searched for template programs hoping that they would be better than the ones she tried a few years ago. After using the demo version of Sandvox for a few hours, she was sold and decided to recreate our website.

Alabama EARS is an all-volunteer organization. Our volunteers have jobs, families and all the chores life throws at us all. We are dedicated to doing as much as we can with the little we have (time and money) for domestic rabbits. We don't have the funds to hire someone to do website work for us and if we did receive a windfall we'd probably use it on spays and neuters anyway. In addition, we need updates made frequently to keep our members and volunteers informed about chapter business. We don't have time to write what we want, submit it to a consultant, wait for the change and follow up with a request for tweaking. When we have news, it want it up there now! When we have a newsletter, party invite, plea for volunteers, or a happy tale to share we want to share it now! Sanvox gives us that ability. We can also customize what's really important to us by editing most of the raw html if we choose.

Photos, photos, photos! The photo galleries are so easy! In our group, photos of happy house rabbits on the couch, using a litter box, playing with toys, waiting to be adopted....well those photos are what helps us get the attention of site visitors. We NEED to have a clean, fast easy way to upload and share photos to get our visitors to read about domestic rabbit care and return to our site. The galleries make all that possible.

We've been blushing with the raves we've heard from our members since we launched our Sandvox site and our donations have gone up as well! (Plus, our webmaster doesn't have to spend all that time coding photos individually anymore! UG!)