Large problem for the Nature Foundation St Maarten is the lack of dedicated IT staff and lack of funding to acquire them. The organisation is basically run by two full-time people and a bunch of volunteers and interns.

Running the old WordPress website on servers kindly shared by the DCNA on Aruba during a crisis, meant that any IT problems had to be solved by the staff at DCNA, who’s core business is not theirs. So the desire existed to break free from DCNA and get their own website and Email hosting and be in control themselves for as many things as possible.

Nature Foundation SXM

I prepared a full WordPress.org migration off of Bluehost servers to WordPress.com with only 1 minute downtime and full preservation of the content. Domain names were transferred back to the Nature Foundation as well using services from Gandi.net in France. By using the alternative domain naturefoundation.org first, I could migrate the whole site behind the scenes and verify everything was working before also pointing the primary domain name naturefoundationsxm.org to the same website.

Google for Work aka GSuite was used to set-up new cloud mailboxes and Google’s cloud services such as Drive and Keep (for notes) for all four employees and make it easy for them to share files through the cloud with each other, instead of keeping local copies of everything on their desktops and laptops. Full Email archives were transferred over secure IMAP overnight, before the new mailboxes were shared with the staff. No mails were lost! The new mail was consolidated with the individual GMail mailboxes, to provide a comprehensive overview of all the mails they had ever sent or received! Finally, one Email to rule them all.

Water damage and hurricanes are a real threat to the office and the lack of backups makes it a matter of time before files get lost. The cloud and Google Drive prevents that and reduces the reliance on IT staff and backups.

  • WordPress.com SaaS
  • Google GSuite for Email in the cloud plus all of Google’s services for work
  • Gandi.net for reliable DNS & domain services with great control panel functionality and delegation of control to the Nature Foundation without losing the ability to assist when staff needs help

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