After about 6 months of development, the new look Guild website went live in June. The old website was looking a bit tired, and was increasingly out of date. And with the main complaint I received from various secretaries in the Guild that it was difficult to add news items to the website, I decided that a complete overhaul was the best way forward.
I knew from the start that I wouldn’t be able to do this by myself, so I asked my husband Mark and our son Dan (studying IT and Computer Science at A Level) to help with the technical side, leaving me to be the designer, content editor and overall project manager. You probably won’t notice it just by browsing the site, but most of the work needed to make the website what it is came from Dan writing computer code to make it do exactly what I wanted!
We are now using WordPress as the ‘backend’, which is what I also use for this newsletter. This makes it much easier to add new articles, and authors of posts don’t have to be as computer techy as the old system needed. The calendars are run using Google calendars, which many people are already familiar with. Overall it is much easier to add photos and other media, making the website look more dynamic and interesting to read. Many of the comments I have received about it also mention how easy it is to navigate.
The website is still a work in progress. In particular the towers pages will get some tweaking in the next few months as we add a few features. In the pipeline are the ability to search for towers by name (almost ready to be rolled out), and adding filters to search results – so you should be able to search by toilet facilities, number of bells, access to ringing room and so on. We are also going to be adding maps:
This is a screenshot of our test map which shows all of the towers by district.
I am always happy to get feedback about the website – go and take a look, and you can fill in the feedback form to let me know what you think.
Rebecca Banner
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