Christian Engineers in Development

Christian Engineers in Development (CED) are a small UK charity that works directly with communities in the developing world, supporting infrastructure (water, architecture, building) projects with technical skills. Recent projects have included providing water to rural communities in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, and the charity are also working on proposals to preserve Zanzibar Cathedral, one of Tanzania’s most important heritage sites.

I was asked to rebuild their website and bring it more up to date compared with their previous design. Of course I chose WordPress, to provide them with the flexibility they needed for both the current and any future designs.

The key challenges in this project were:

Getting the design right
The design went through several iterations, as expected. But to be honest the most difficult aspect was working with the charity’s insistence on using a strong blue (#0000BD since you ask) for their logo, and trying to balance this relatively harsh colour with a more muted modern palette. However the client had some clear design ideas based on other sites they liked and it was straightforward to develop a custom homepage template to accommodate their ideas. We found the use of personas to be useful in adapting a very inward-looking site to appeal to a wider audience.

Timescale
The process took a bit longer than I had anticipated, for a combination of reasons. In particular as both I and the person I was working with have demanding day jobs there was a lot of time spent waiting for diary slots. Although elapsed time was longer than expected, the actual time working on the project wasn’t as inflated, but there a definitely lessons to be learned for the next time.

WordPress 3.0
I started developing the site on WordPress 2.9.2 but WordPress 3.0 has been in the margins for a while now. I’ve launched the site on 3.0 RC1 as that means I can make use of some of the out-of-the-box features such as the new Menu system (although it’s not quite 100% working in my theme yet – prizes for who can spot what’s wrong).

Other 3.0 features would be really useful, in particular the use of Custom Post Types to allow the charity to update specific metadata used for their development projects (at the moment they’re using Custom Fields which is a bit cumbersome for someone not that familiar with WordPress). But these will have to wait for the next iteration.

Hosting
I also advised the charity on moving away from their existing host (1and1) to a host that provides a greater level of support (including familiarity with WordPress). The choices I presented them were Dreamhost, Xilo and Bluehost (thanks to the wordcampuk mailing list for advice). Bluehost was chosen on the basis of previous good experience and price.

Managing the move was very straightforward – I used Bluehost’s SimpleScripts installer to install the basic WP site (was offered 3.0 RC1 which was a bonus!), imported from the test site, made a few config changes, and the client updated the nameservers for their domain. All done in around an hour.

So, a few lessons learned from this project, but interesting to work with a team who are clearly passionate about what they do. The next challenge for them is to build up more of a social network within the organisation (geographically dispersed, working in small virtual teams). I’m already thinking BuddyPress…