Project case study

The Pilgrims’ Association

A customised management solution for a site bought up to date

Summary

Consultancy, redesign and development of bespoke content management system.

Objective

The Pilgrims’ Association is an organisation that provides a support network and talking shop for those involved with education, heritage and tourism and the care of visitors, pilgrims or tourists at christian foundations throughout the UK and Ireland. They initially contacted me based on recommendation because they needed help. Their website had gone offline without notice, so I had to discover what had happened and then negotiate for its recovery and reinstatement.

Solution

Because of the poor service, I then recommended changing hosts to one more reliable and responsive. This was managed and the site successfully migrated without any significant downtime. A new domain was chosen to reflect the changed membership and role of the organisation.

They then required that the site be redesigned. The old one had been a basic and functional one reliant on an Access database, but it suffered from poor navigation and held little content, large amounts of which was out of date and now incorrect. It was managed by a limited content management system. Meetings were held to discuss the needs of the new site and an in-depth site statistics report commissioned to help identify points of weakness and opportunities for development. A Pro-forma in both online and Word document formats was also produced so that members could update, amend and expand their information on the site. A plan and architecture was developed for the new site and visual protoypes put together to show the potential look and feel of the design from which cross-browser templates were then developed.

The final result is a redesigned site that is user-friendly, accessible and more contemporary in feel. Content has been expanded, and a Googlemap has been integrated to provide geographic information of members’ locations. All of this is run and managed via a custom-built content management system that runs on the open source technologies of PHP and MySQL and provides scope not just to alter current content, but also to add pages and expand the site further as and when necessary. There are levels of control, so that members can edit and maintain their own submissions and pages, but overall editorial control for the whole site resides elsewhere.

In addition to this public-facing vehicle for the promotion of members there was also a need for a private, internal system that would allow for communication between members - so that ideas, skills and resources could be exchanged. To satisfy this need, a YahooGroup was set up because it provided a ready-built environment with a wealth of facilities that could enable these personal and shared transactions.

What they said

“Aidann has helped us with our website since our idea for it first arose. He is a pleasure to work with and understands the Christian ethos of our members. His patience is endless as most of our members would not consider themselves more than basically computer literate. Whenever I have a problem he responds immediately, I am sure he must despair sometimes at the triviality of my questions but he never lets me feel inadequate. I am frequently amazed how quickly he replies and then sorts out my problem. It is a great pleasure to whole-heartedly recommend Aidann as a website designer and internet consultant.”
Judy Davies

Client

The Pilgrims’ Association

Sector

Faith
Heritage
Non-profit & Charity

Date

August 2006 - December 2006

Services provided

Status

Live

View project

http://www.cathedralsplus.org.uk/