As a company we believe that it’s important to give something back to the society in which we live and work. Doing business can be tough and sometimes you need to make unpopular decisions but this is what enables companies to thrive and eventually help others. So, once in a while we pick up a project for companies or organizations that do something worthwhile but can’t afford our services.
In recent days we put two of these projects online; the website for the local cancer foundation and the website for a new hotel / training facility for local hospitality students.
Princess Wilhelmina Fund
The Princess Wilhelmina Fund is the local cancer foundation. These volunteers help the community by giving people information about how to prevent cancer, how to deal with cancer and what the family can do to help. Besides this they help people with money, prosthetics and psychological support.
The PWF needed help with the information part of their tasks. They had a website but it was outdated and was not suited to the amount of information they wanted to have on it. So, we built a new website for them with a very clear structure and a lot of information about cancer. It went live just before the Ride for the Roses and the comments on it are good so far.
Academy Hotel Curacao
The latest addition to the hotels on Curacao is not just any hotel; it is also a training facility for the local hospitality students. Tourism is booming on Curacao and there are a lot of students currently studying to work in tourism, but there weren’t enough places for them to do an internship. This shortage prompted the Curacao Hospitality Training Foundation to build a hotel themselves and to let the students run it as part of their internship.
With the help of the government of Curacao, local banks and a lot of other sponsors the hotel was built and has been operational for a few months now. The grand opening of the hotel is on February 17, 2009 and looking at the occupancy rates of the first few months it looks to become a very successful hotel indeed.
As part of our sponsoring of the Academy Hotel we built their website (which went live today) and will help them with trainings and the maintenance of the site. The website as it is now is mostly a front-end for sales, but we’re also working on an extranet as a part of the site where students can log in and get information about schedules, books, house rules etcetera and communicate about their work and school amongst themselves.
Hi Joost, very nice of you guys to work like this as well. It’s indeed not only about the money!