Website design

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tao  •  28 Jan 2022   •    
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My wife has just taken up a chair role at the organisation she works under. A non-paid role, but important to keep it running and it’s members accredited. I overheard her speaking on Zoom with one of her colleagues and the topic of conversation moved to their website. It has evolved over the years, refered to as a “load of papers stuffed in a filing cabinet drawer” rather than a properly designed site.

I was half expecting my wife to offer my WordPress services to redo it for them, but apparently a new design has been created already and just the content needs adding. They can just copy and paste from the old site, but it does need updating and reads a little dry in places.

I would be interested in helping them out as it could be a cool project to get my teeth into. Also, there would be parts of the site I would need to develop that I hadn’t covered before, such as a members area and handling orders and payments.

The members area needs to allow the organisation members to log in and update their details, add links to their website or social media pages. A sort of “members directory” that can then be searched or filtered by a normal visitor. WordPress has the ability to allow people to create their own accounts and update their own data, but I would need to find a way to add some additional fields to the user form and also limit who can register. Then, the user data would need to be searchable too.

The orders and payments part needs to allow the processing of membership renewals or ordering booklets and documents. From what I have seen of it, it looks pretty basic.

I am sure there are some plugins that would handle both of these parts easily. The rest of the site is just content.

In fact, the site already runs on WordPress and already uses plugins to handle the membership and payment processing parts, so migrating them to a new design should be easy enough providing they work ok with newer page design tools such as Elementor or Gutenberg.

However, the plugins in use are quite old, so it may just be easier to look at using something newer with better features.

Looking at some of the site code, it is clear there needs to be an overhaul of the SEO too. They are using the Yoast SEO plugin already but the custom WordPress theme has been created in such a way that none of the meta tags are being automatically added. This could be a simple fix, adding the relevant code to the template to allow this to work properly.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few months. If I did get involved, it would be for free, but it would look good on my resume. There would also need to be a full SEO plan, content review and migration plan. None of which is quick or easy.

Comments

Working on pro bono, social impact projects always gets me excited too! 💪

jasonleow  •  29 Jan 2022, 12:30 am

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