Welcome to the new and improved Safari International website in-progress. I was hoping to perform this particular magic act from entirely behind the green curtain, but Murphy had a different plan for me.....
Here's the backstory:
You've been hearing me whine about our website software needing a major update now for a couple years at least. In March, I quit researching and blindly hoping for some miracle which would allow me to sidestep that need and I actually confronted the update process head-on. I setup a sandboxed development server, downloaded the fresh upgrade software and beat my head against a brick wall for about five full days of frustrating failures before I FINALLY got a copy of this website to run on the new software. So skipping all the ugly details, let's fast-forward to today. I realized that my goal of introducing our website, running cleanly and with full functionality, to the online world was not going to happen as quickly as needed. Welcome to "Plan B"....the website development on the new software is continuing offline in the background, however, the new website address is now active and is populated with our original site software until the new software is ready to go live. This is necessarily a bandaid solution because our current site software is obsolete and no longer being supported....it got old and the rest of the internet has outpaced the capabilities and features that our software can fully support.
But wait! There's more....as our organization has aged and responded to the changes that transpired over time, we have also been required to upgrade, often with considerable effort and painful strife, and many times later than optimum. The Safari International of today is not the same as the Safari International that was there to support us in our glory days past. The needs of our organization have changed and so have we in response. Our website needed to grow (painfully so) and that process is in-work...but our public face through the website also needed to grow in ways that the safari-international.org website address could not properly support. Today our group is much leaner in membership, seeking to attract new members from a totally different demographic....and we are spread much thinner across our still huge geographic footprint. As a result, we are tied more closely today to our parent organization (we are, after all, a chapter of that organization) and we need to reflect that relationship better....and thus, the new domain name as you saw when you pointed your browser to the original address. We have moved (electronically) and rebranded in order to better deliver a clear picture of who we are and what we do. (More to follow....)
