The Huron Stewardship Council has maintained a web portal for the past six years at Huronstewardship.on.ca . This was has been used as a resource for partner organizations to support their growth and efficacy and as an opportunity to engage the public at large in these organization's activities and objectives.

In conjunction with the the Huron County Water Protection Steering Committee a major redesign has been undertaken to further enable community building by providing an economical, accessible, effective communications tool focused on environmental issues affecting residents in Huron County.

The website now has a 'home' on a more modern server at lower cost, with regular backups and full logging of website traffic.  The code underlying the operation of the site has been completely replaced with a popular open source code base. That means no licence fees, on going updates for performance and security on a stable and adaptable software system.

Building channels for aggregating news was one of the objectives of the changes. RSS feeds from relevant sites (these are automated news streams) can be viewed by going to 'News Feeds' in the header tabs. News from any source can be submitted and edited  for 'Recent updates' on the 'Home' page. Links to partner sub-sites are generated by changes to the sub-sites and displayed on the portal 'Home' page under ' Recent Partner News'.

A master calendar of events is provided on the home page  which can display all available events or filter only specific 'partner' events.

A complete newsletter management system has been implemented. It allows users to fully manage their own subscriptions to available partner's newsletters. It  eliminates duplication in you mail box as  any email address will only receive any newsletter once only. It allows users to tailor their subscriptions to the their areas of interest. It is an opt in / opt out system so every message will include links to modify a subscription or to unsubscribe.

Partners can setup their own newsletter subscription list or send to others (or all). Creating and sending  newsletters is as simple as sending email.

Performance measurement through the server logging will allow measurement of  traffic sources, volume and persistence, user interest and participation(i.e. click throughs) and news sources and volume - in other word what works and what doesn't!

By using that analysis to direct changes we can in turn improve search engine optimization - that is keywords, key-phrases, domain names, cross linking, ad-links, etc. used for search engine indexing which will result in wider public exposure to the issues and information contained in the website.

So now it is time for you to go to www.huronstewardship.ca and kick the tires.  Let us know if you break anything,  what you like or don't like, suggest changes or additions, submit news, links, calendar dates to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it  . We will use the newsletter service to periodically notify subscribers of on going developments.

We look forward to working closely with each of the partners to maximize the potential of this resource for your group and will provide hands on assistance to develop your existing sub-site ,or 'fire up' a new one for you or setup a newsletter list for you. Contact  This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it