Alrighty! After months of hard work and focused collaboration, we are super proud to announce the launch of our new, world class, Ecobricks.org website– in time for the coverage of the Indonesian Ecobrick movement this week on CNN. Rallying around the mission of keeping plastic out of the biosphere, the awesome new site is a testament to the power of collaboration. The site is coalescence of creative energies of artists, illustrators, writers, translators, patrons, programmers, designers and more.
The biggest addition to the site is… story! Of course, Ecobricks.org has all the technical info you need to get going ecobricking. However, we’ve found that the amazing stories of folks around the world who, through courage and persistence, have solved plastic in their home and community are even more inspiring! With the help of up-and-coming Indonesian cartoonist Fabianus Bayu, our site is brightened up with awesome cartoons of Ecobrick Earth heroes like Ibu Sufi, Pak Agung, Jo Stodgel, Pak Rohman. Fabi has not only catoonified our heros, but he’s animated them. You gotta see it to believe it!Our site is revamped from the bottom up. Thanks to the guidance of web maestro Reinardt Gilfillan our site is running the stellar Divi 3.0 wordpress theme– making it fully desktop, tablet and mobile friendly. Thanks to Rick Smith‘s guidance and support we’ve revamped our content system with free access and a πPatron membershp that enables you to support the movement. Thanks to the contribution of the programmers at OntheGoSystems we’re running their WMPL multi-language management tool– which will enable us to deploy our site through volunteer translation fast and furious. Thanks to WPGoogleMaps, we have their pro map software installed for a collaborative map of ecobrickers around the world. Thanks to a donation by Trisha Joe we got an old laptop revamped with Ubuntu to work on the site.
The new site features the haunting B&W drawings of Jo Stodgel and heart rending dump site photos by Alexandre Sattler and Ecobrick photos by Josephine Chan Need a qucik low-down on Ecobricks? The 1-minute animations of Elena Molchanova are now front and center on our core pages. Our iconography and core vision image are done by acclaimed FIlipino cartoonish El Tiburon Grande. We’ve had help developing and translating our vision ecobrick guides into half a dozen languages by Ai Igamoto, Clara Fall. Kusumorini Susanto, Ani Himawati, Ratih Sukma and Nurkinanti Laraskusuma Carly Gayle and more.Our servers and software keep running with the support of dozens of πPatrons who support ecobricks with 3.14$ donations– thank you! Speical thanks to Andy Dieleman, Elle Dunbar, Leslie Gaudette, Shåne Deptöck and Clayton Horton who have helped us along with the costs to launch the next phase of Ecobricks.org
Virtually every page on the site is revamp with fresh pictures, drawing and content. This new site and content will be a backbone for the movement for the next years and countries to come. Here’s a quick summary of some of the changes:
- New How to Ecobrick page: Ecobricking is pretty simple, but after three years we’ve revamped this unchanged page with a clearer methodology, new steps, and density minimums.
- New Why Make Ecobricks page: Recently a poorly made viral-vid got us lots of skeptical questions! We’ve thus gone back, and laid out clearly the reasons, science and why ecobricking is important. There are there were more than we thought!
- New Support Section: These days we get emails from around the world on a daily basis about ecobricks. To help get the answers up publicly we now have a tech support section on our site.
- New Training Page: We’ve now got the full list of ecobrick training workshops up on an engaging page. Plus, now we’re offering online Skype Trainings.
- About Us page revamped with Mission, Vision and Dedication in the forefront.
- Ecobricks Building Techniques is revamped to simply show the five main building methods with engaging diagrams and photos, with links to more information.
- Plastic is Poison: The core reason for ecobricking! We now have a front and center page all about the dangers of plastic.
And more! Discover our new site for yourself. Be sure to click through for the downloads and signup. We’re working on next on deploying the translations of the new site. If you’d like to help us out, drop us a line.
