Bordermedia

Having had the same design for our last website for over two years now, we decided it was time for a new look. In line with our Wordpress fixation, the new website has been unashamedly shoe-horned (in a day I might add) into a Wordpress 2.6 installation.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

We have added a small Google Adwords advertising banner to the middle column on the website - this will hopefully help to cover the costs of our hosting, and allow us to introduce a Libsyn podcast hosting account in the near future.

We hope you like it.

WEAVE (Women’s Education for Advancement and Empowerment) was founded in 1990, with the intent to empower indigenous women and support their needs and basic human rights. The organization has evolved over the years, especially in the context of the influx of refugees from Burma.

Bordermedia was asked to design and build a new website for WEAVE, and follow this up with a day’s training in Chiang Mai. It was again decided that a modified Wordpress system - traditionally a ‘blogging’ platform - would fulfil WEAVE’s requirements for an SEO-friendly and easily maneagable content management system that would not be too challenging for the non native English speaking employees to learn and use.

Borderline is a Café, Shop & Gallery based in Mae Sot, Thailand. Borderline began with three women’s organisations seeking to establish a shared marketing space for women from Burma (living along the Thai-Burma border) to sell their hand made items. The women’s groups also hoped that by having a collectively managed market they would build their capacity for running income generation projects with the communities with which they work. In May 2004, the Borderline Women’s Collective opened.

Bordermedia was asked to design and build a new website and online shop for Borderline, in such a way that it would only require 2-4 days training for the local staff in Mae Sot to be able to update the website themselves. It was decided that Wordpress - traditionally a ‘blogging’ platform - would fulfil these requirements. Wordpress is powerful enough to act as a simple Content Management System, and yet simple enough for people with little or no web design experience to be able to use to update the website themselves with the minimum of training.

Givetoburma.org was conceived, set up and built in 24 hours. It is a one page website intended to take ‘emergency relief’ donations to be sent inside Burma around the time of the Monks’ protests in October 2007. The website, as intended, was sent around ‘virally’ by email, and to date has taken more than $16,000 in donations.

Bordermedia initially received an email appealing for donations from one of the members of Youth Solidarity of Burma. We quickly replied suggesting setting up a one page appeal website that would take donations using PayPal. After a meeting an hour or two later, we set up a PayPal account for Givetoburma.org and designed and built the site, putting it live within 24 hours. Following this, we provided support and advice as well as helping with publicity and marketing the website online.

Update: The Givetoburma.org website was used a second time around during an appeal for victims of Cyclone Nargis inside Burma. It again raised several thousand dollars from generous donors.

At the time of writing, Givetoburma.org is second only to Burma Campaign UK on Google for searches with the keyword phrase “Donate to Burma”. It is third on Google for the keyword phrase “Make a donation to Burma”.

World Education/Consortium works with Burmese refugees, migrants and internally displaced people along the border to ensure that they have access to quality education. World Education/Consortium’s vision is one of capacity and empowerment and the belief that education is the catalyst to change.

bordermedia developed the World Education/Consortium website using open source content management system software (CMS). This enables end users the ability to add documents, images, video and other content without requiring in-depth understanding of web development techniques. This has 2 main advantages, firstly website content can be maintained in a timely manner without requiring a third party and secondly it minimises the amount of training required for staff.

The Free Burma Rangers (FBR) is a multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement bringing help, hope and love to people in the war zones of Burma. Ethnic pro-democracy groups send teams to be trained, supplied and sent into the areas under attack inside Burma to provide emergency assistance and human rights documentation.

Bordermedia was asked to provide some new page designs which, once approved, were built into a set of HTML templates along with accompanying CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files. The Free Burma Rangers’ webmaster then used the files provided to ‘re-skin’ the website himself.

Web development classes were conducted for Curriculum Project comprising students from Curriculum Project and BVP over the course of 2 months. From this training, the students were then able to be actively involved in the development of their own website.

Curriculum Project work with post-high school (Post-10) schools along the Thai/Burma border and work with teachers and students to design curricula and materials, and also provides teacher training and teacher support programmes.

The purpose of the website is to provide these materials in an easily accessible online format.

KESAN (Karen Environmental and Social Action Network) is the first local native non-profit Karen organisation to raise environmental awareness among Karen society.

It works to create a platform for Karens’ to express their concerns about the environment to the world as well as to the local and national leaderships.

The KESAN website was developed to allow the organization to provide information on their currently running projects to a wider audience as well as to provide a number of regular publications online.

Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) are a small grass-roots organisation documenting the human rights situation of people in rural Burma.

One of our developers undertook a redesign and redevelopment of the KHRG website whilst working for KHRG, which began with an assessment of the current website - looking at its design, speed to download & visitor statistics.

A series of documentation was drawn up including sitemaps & wireframe diagrams detailing the proposed new design & functionality. This was followed by full page mock-ups in Photoshop.

The new website has been developed in HTML and PHP with a MySQL database storing report information. Search & donation functionality has been introduced to the website. A password-protected admin area allows KHRG to update sections of the website themselves, and a Dreamweaver template system has been put into place for updating static website content.

Delivery of the website was followed up with several training sessions, and a training manual containing all the information required for KHRG to update and maintain the system themselves.

The Thoo Mwe Nee School has been built in Karen State to address the critical shortage of education available for IDP children in this area.

The website was designed with assistance from the Thoo Mwe Nee School’s founder in order to generate donations so that the school can continue to provide essential services to the local children such as education, food and medicines.