Your Story, My Story

Before changing anything we captured the public site: its pages, copy, images and the stories already published, with their reaction counts. The charity wanted a refinement, not a new look, so the rebuild keeps the teal, gold and purple, the Poppins type, the logo and the original lines such as “Sharing stories, changing lives, one story at a time”.

Underneath, it is new. The site now runs on Astro and Cloudflare Workers, with the stories in a Cloudflare D1 database that we host and look after.

The old site asked people to sign up and log in before they could share, and that is where it broke. The new form needs no account at all. A writer gives the story a title, picks an age group, category, tags and state, and chooses to stay anonymous or show a first name. Email is optional and only used to tell them the story is live.

A crisis banner sits above the form, ticking the storytelling guidelines is required, and writers aged 14 or under are encouraged to share with a parent, carer or trusted adult’s knowledge. The form still works with JavaScript switched off.

Every submission lands in a pending queue. Moderators at Sabrina’s Reach4Life work in a private admin area behind Cloudflare Access, where they approve or reject stories, edit out anything that could identify someone, feature up to three on the homepage and read contact messages. The site stores no passwords. Spam is held back by a hidden honeypot field and an hourly limit per IP address on stories, messages and reactions.

Donate now opens its own page, which explains the charity’s tax deductible status and what gifts fund, then links to the official Sabrina’s Reach4Life donation page. The site takes no payments itself. The storytelling guidelines, privacy policy and terms are real pages instead of links to nowhere.

Lifeline, Kids Helpline and 000 sit in the footer of every page, with tap targets at least 48px on a phone. The original put white text on teal, gold and purple, which falls short of accessible contrast. On the rebuilt home, share and donate pages, every line of text we measured on a solid background meets the WCAG AA contrast level. A testimonials section that used stock portraits came down until there are real people to show.

The new site was live on yourstorymystory.org.au within two weeks of the charity saying yes. We moved the domain to the new site, kept the records its email sending relies on, and left the old server untouched, with the steps to switch back written down in case anything went wrong.

After launch we put a fictional story and a fictional contact message through the live site from start to finish, submission to moderation, then deleted both.