The MG Car Club Lincolnshire Centre wanted a new website to replace a legacy website built with Microsoft FrontPage. The old site had many of the features that they wanted for the new site but in a design that was easier to navigate, update, and with some additional features. At the heart of the project was the need for a calendar and events feature that could help their members easily find events and plan the year ahead.
Other features include a blog and a directory with items for sale. In the future, they may add a newsletter and membership area.
There are several other MG Centre websites as well as the MG Car Club parent site. Discussion with the client team helped them understand what they liked and didn’t like about other similar sites. Together we developed a structure and menu layout that meant that content from the old site could be copied across (and updated), structured and enhanced with images.
Project Scope & Methodology
The project scope included:
- Identifying the domain location and legacy hosting agreement (and capturing passwords, etc. from the retiring webmaster)
- Creating a demo WordPress wesbite (on my hosting environment)
- Identifying solutions to the fetaure requirments – plugins, layout and structure
- Evaluating possible hosting solutions and acquiring the right one for the client – low cost and felxible with full cpanel access and no restriction on email accounts
- Migrating the Demo site the new host
- Setting up the hosting including managing the existing domain (changing nameservers)
- Creating new email addresses for all the committee members (and installing forwarders to private email addresses)
- Optimising the website for speed, SEO, adding new events
- Creating a handover document setting out information about teh hosting environment, key plugins, security, etc.
- Training sessions – by zoom
- Monthly maintenance of the website (and handover)
Technical Solutions
Website
The website solution is WordPress. This seemed an obvious choice partly because of the overall power of the CMS but also because the parent MG Car Club is also built with WordPress – checked using BuiltWith. WordPress plugins allow WordPress websites to deliver a very wide range of features.
Hosting
A number of hosting packages were evaluated and StablePoint was selected. The low-cost package provides full Cpanel access, emails and a great support system. Other great hosting companies were evaluated. (Check out hosting companies in the Directory)
Main plugins
The main plugins used to deliver this website solution are:
Modern Events Calendar – used to organise events and display as lists or on a calendar. By structuring the event categories it is possible to show different types of events on different pages as lists or calendars. It is easy to add re-occurring events and re-use locations and organisers.
Directorist – used to organise and display for sale items and services including the club’s sponsors. A very flexible plugin that works well with classified ads as well as general information listings. The submission form allows registered website members to add listings from the front end. The pro version of Directorist allows you to charge for listings too.
Ultimate Maps by Supsystic – used to show the location of some regular meetings. The map is very powerful and it is easy ti add new markers or create new maps.
Smart Slider3 by Nextend – a great way to show images via a slider and a lot more.
Sydney Theme – the Sydney theme was used for this client to help them have a slick, uncluttered layout that would be easy to update and change in the future.
Rankmath – Search Engine Optimisation and more
PostX – layout plugin
WPForms – contact form
(Check out all the WordPress plugins I have used in the Directory)
Client website
The client’s website can be found at MG Car Club Lincolnshire Centre
