We are pleased to present to you version 2.0 of The Van Raes Family website. After struggling with web hosts, back-end software incompatibilities, and a whole host of other problems, we are now in full development of this new re-designed site. For those of you who have visited before, most of the same features are still here but the look and feel of the site has changed. We have implemented a new photo gallery and all the artwork has been re-tooled for better performance. It is our sincere hope that the end user experience will be a little bit better, especially in terms of speed. Below are some of the features here at site.

This website is being powered by Joomla. Joomla is a content management system (CMS) that allows us to update or add information and media very quickly. Since nobody here has the time to do a whole lot of coding I figured it would be in our interests to implement a CMS so that anyone who wanted to could contribute content to the site. In any case, Joomla allows us to change the look and feel of the site almost instantly if we feel like it and most importantly it allows us to upload images to our gallery with very little work. There is a ton of community support for Joomla so there is hundreds of snap in modules available for it as well. Now we have no need to have separate applications to display pictures or a blog or whatever....we can do it all right from the back-end of Joomla.