T&RA websites

I'm looking for inspiration and advice for making a great website for our council block. Can anyone point me towards good websites that serve estates or blocks in SE1?

I've just started putting a new one together for Perronet House. Ages ago it just used to be my blog about the highs and lows of living here, the dead bodies, the turds in the staircase, the troublesome neighbours, but those days are long gone now. Now we have a T&RA (since April) and we even have a beautiful Christmas tree in our reception decorated by the resident children. So it's time we had a grown up website that helped residents better connect with each other, services, local amenities and presented a better face to the public of being a Perronetonian. Any advice or pointers most welcome.

www.perronethouse.com
www.facebook.com/perronethouse
www.twitter.com/perronethouse

When you find so something could you share, as this is an area we all seem pretty bad at. Perhaps we should try to get resident involvement to do some specific training for this?

Boss House used to have a website about 12 years ago, created and maintained by one of the residents.

However, the management company pointed out that there were legal issues involved in representing a "community" as it was not a personal website.

I am not sure exactly what the issues where, but the site was deleted and has never returned.

Some links to local TRA sites:
http://www.london-se1.co.uk/community/tras.html
(yes, I realise there are quite a few broken links there)

The excellent Draper TA Hall is out of use until March next year.
A steering group of residents has formed and they are hoping to open the hall in 2013.

Thanks James. A useful list, the big lesson that comes across is "lots of these T&RA websites fail". You're right, lots of broken links, perhaps due to lack of time / money / use for tenants. The websites that are still live are:
- Albert Association
- Avondale Square
- County Hall
- Empire Square
- Jacobs Island
- Jam Factory
- Metro Central Heights
- Octavia Hill Estate
- Shad Thames
- Tabard Gardens South (remnants)
- Trinity Newington
- Webber & Quentin

James, perhaps revise the list and add PerronetHouse.com? And we'll endeavour to keep our site here up and running for the long term, evolving as we get new ideas and inspiration. Trinity Newington is particularly impressive, and incredibly they have lottery funding. Ours doesn't even have T&RA funding, it doesn't take much with WordPress these days.

Take a look here:
http://lantandbittern.co.uk/index.html

very much a work in progress for the usual reasons (lack of time etc etc)plus the recent chequered history of this TRA.
It's very encouraging to hear of such positive progress at Perronet House, and our TRA hopes to move forward similarly.

A key issue is to minimise the amount of time involved in managing community sites. You can connect a Wordpress website so that it updates the feeds for your Facebook and your Twitter page. By doing this you'll only need to worry about maintaining one source of information and cutting out a lot of work. Having said that, it is becoming quite common for community groups to use Facebook as a one stop solution, again to cut out duplication of work.

graham wrote:

The excellent Draper TA Hall is out of use until March next year.
A steering group of residents has formed and they are hoping to open the hall in 2013.

I would hope they stick together through the awful experience of the building works. Can not believe that they allow tenants to live like this. Southwark Council should be ashamed