Adverts used in the Metro

I was able to help in a couple of ways:

• Helping them to set up the survey in SurveyMonkey. This was fairly straightforward, and setting up the survey in SurveyMonkey early enabled us to visualise the user’s journey through the survey, and to run some early pilots to iron out (most of) the inevitable “eh?” questions.
• Creating links and link pages in the BiG website, including setting up a new domain for use in print media – www.glasgowspiritualitysurvey.com.
• Designing a postcard and a set of adverts to be run in the Metro over a 4-day campaign period. (I didn’t take the pictures, they’re all from Kim and Gerd, two friends who’ve given permission.)

Survey Postcard

If you live or work in Glasgow City Centre, and would like to complete the survey, there’s still time!

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.

I designed and built the first website for APBC in 2002, and the site has been through several iterations since then. The latest version is on WordPress, and uses a modified Almost Spring theme which (I’ve just found out) isn’t available any more from the WP theme directory.

As the site is a church, some customisation was required – in particular to support weekly rotas. I couldn’t find a plugin to do this, so at the moment this is custom code from previous versions of apbc.net called from within individual pages with a custom display in the sidebar, but I’m in the process of converting it to a proper WordPress plugin/widget combination.

The other thing I’ve not been able to find yet is a good calendar plugin to allow us to publicise events well in advance. We’re therefore experimenting with a hosted service from churchupdate.co.uk.

I’ve also encountered some people challenges – in particular encouraging non-geeks to take responsibility for content management and updating information on the site. This has taken a lot longer than I’d expected.