Project: Gagana Samoa
Story time.
My family used to run a Samoan newspaper, which taught me so much of what I know about the Samoan language and culture. Back in the early 2000s, I built the newspaper’s first website complete with its own guestbook (remember those?) and bulletin/message board.
When the newspaper closed in 2006, I tried to shut down the website, too, but our regular visitors had too much fun leaving messages for each other and asked me to at least leave the forums open.
By 2008, that message board evolved into a small social network for Samoans around the world. We got up to over 10,000 members, even, back in the days of Bebo and Myspace, just before Facebook became a thing.
Our social network was built on the Ning platform and featured several discussion boards, little group pages, personal profile pages, personal blogs, a huge music component – we loved checking out each others’ playlists – and even a video chat. Our Samoan Lyrics page was a natural outshoot (is that what you call it?) of this social network, and I made sure to include some educational content, too, in the form of blogs about Samoan language and culture.
Eventually, however… people on the Internet being people on the Internet… Managing the social network became a bit too much. I was not enough manpower (with not enough money) to fight off catfish and chaperone children (who lied about their age to get in) and save adulterous marriages… so after about four years, and with a heavy heart, I closed the social network part of that website.
But I kept the Samoan lyrics up – moved it to its own website – and kept blogging about Samoan life and culture…well, until I found other pretty butterflies to chase.
Last year, almost 20 years after I uploaded our first little Samoan newspaper website, I returned to this Samoan content, rebranded it, and added another website purely for learning the Samoan language.
I don’t know what I was thinking, except that I’m at a stage now in life (i.e. I’m old) where it just feels urgent to me that I master my own heritage language, already. And knowing that I’m hardly the only Samoan with this desire, I just want to share the journey and see what good we can do with this project.
You know, like how that saying goes… I’m trying to build what I want to see in the world.
After lots of brainstorming, tinkering, and experimenting with our new Instagram and YouTube audiences, I now have a solid plan for my overall Samoan brand, now called: Anavatau.
This plan begins with a rebuild of the Gagana Samoa website.
Here’s how we’re going so far.
Recent Achievements:
My content strategy for Gagana Samoa, which includes the website and its social media platforms via Anavatau, is finally in place. Yayy! It just needs a website structure to support it.
Current Focus:
I’ve been diving into Figma to redesign Gagana Samoa, and as a first-time Figma user, it’s incredibly satisfying to see the entire website asone cohesive entity rather than the fragmented bits and pieces I usually work on.
I’m building this iteration of Gagana Samoa on the WordPress platform with Elementor, for now. Eventually, I’ll custom build the entire Anavatau brand – with a unified backend database servicing 3 separate websites – probably as a senior project for the software development degree I’m working on.
For now, Elementor will do the job — I just have to learn how to use it. I’m on it!
Challenges:
Time is my biggest challenge. I’m already a full-time student with a part-time contract (a long-term freelance situation) and a startup in the works (that’s another story). Finding time to rebuild Gagana Samoa is necessary, but not easy.
Upcoming Goals:
My immediate goal is to finish the design in Figma —I’m almost there. Next, I’ll build Gagana Samoa with Elementor and master its functionalities. Then, I’ll transfer the Elementor theme from the dev site (a subdomain) to the main URL.
I’m already beginning to incorporate the content strategy into the new build.
Conclusion:
Speaking of which, content really is king here, right? Everything else I’m building around it is function and decoration.
I’m excited to roll out the content part.. and I’ll share more about that as we get closer to finishing the website.
In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates and thanks for following along!