New CED site, built using WordPress

Previous CED site design - HTML only

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…

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.