Business in Glasgow (BiG) is a Glasgow-based charity helping people make connections between work and spirituality. BiG is run by two Glasgow city centre churches and aims to support office workers in the city by providing monthly seminars along with individual and group support.

The Challenges

BiG is a charity run by voluntary donation, and the key challenges are:

1. Make the site visually appealing with a clean uncluttered appearance.
2. Using the WordPress Posts to support monthly talks (including in advance).
3. Find a way to use the WordPress Authors facility to give detailed speaker biographies.
4. Enable non-geeks to be able to edit and manage the site.
5. Finding a way to manage monthly newsletters in a visually appealing way.

The Solution(s)

Of course, the main solution is WordPress. I had hand-crafted previous incarnations of the BiG site but the WordPress back-office structure and ease of management was a natural fit. Installation on our existing hosting platform was trivial, as usual.

I wrote a completely custom theme with a Homepage template for the front page design that particularly highlighted the upcoming events and occasional features. At present I use a text widget in a front page widget area to manage the regular Feature of the Month. No doubt this will become cleverer and use a specially categorised post soon.

The visual design was influenced by the excellent photograph sourced from Flickr under a Creative Commons licence, and formed the basis for the use of warm and friendly purples and pinks. My initial visual design had lots of businesslike blues and greys, but that came over as much too corporate for the type of organisation.

To enable the future events to be displayed I usee WP_Query to build my own dataset for the Loop. I also used the User fields and description to drive the Speaker pages without using any additional plugins, just using the template tags.

For monthly emails I like Mailchimp as this provides full list management, scheduling and inline WYSIWYG editing. There’s no integration with WP but I don’t think this is necessary at this stage.