Client Meeting - Website

To accompany the report, Our Happy Place are keen to create a community website which would ultimately replace the Worcester North-East site.

As there will only be six weeks of university time after the Easter break when I will be finished with the report, I will not be expected to create a working site but rather a visual mock-up which could then be worked into a website by another student next semester. The emphasis of the website would be to encourage community involvement with it, and give the community training to be able to run the website.

One difficulty will be whether this will be a stand-alone website or a page on the main council's site which would complicate matters and reduce the level of creative freedom, as well as needing permissions for content.

The sections that they want on the website include an introduction page, events, schemes, projects, calendar, a directory of contacts for education and health etc. The old website has a large following within the community, and so it would include a lot of the elements from there such as the blog, and could even replace the site or visitors would automatically be redirected to the new Our Happy Place website.

We spoke about allowing members of the community and schools and project leaders to directly edit the content but we thought this was too open and it would ultimately need an administrator to vet the contents. A way to include the community would be to have social media plug-ins, with live feeds forming a blog.

I have a few areas to look into, such as furthering my research into web template software such as WordPress or Joomla, which is a new one for me. I also will need to research other similar organisations' websites such as village and community sites such as that for Upton-upon-Severn which my tutor is working on.