Cambridgeshire Beekeepers' Association - A new website for the CBKA.
This project came about when I decided to take up beekeeping. I found my local beekeepers' association and decided to offer my services to update their current site.
Working closely with the chairman of the Cambridgeshire Beekeepers' Association and a website working group, we established their needs and implemented a plan to design a whole new site with Web 2.0 technologies and user updateable content.
This was another website that was perfect to implement using the Open Source Joomla Content Management System.
The first thing we did was to organise the purchasing of the website hosting together with a new domain name to use during development.
The Joomla CMS provided a ready-made template and an Article based system that allows the CBKA members to update their own relevant sections of the website, for example newsletters, diary entries and details about public shows etc.
The association has several venues for sit down meetings, courses and apiary sessions. Directions to the venues were easy to show using a dynamic Google Map plugin for Joomla. The map is pin point accurate using GPS and the website visitor can zoom in to get more detail or zoom out to get their bearings.
To help the association display a calendar of events for the year, I implemented a Google Calendar based diary. The members responsible for the diary login to a Google webmail account and add event information to the Google Calendar. Entries and changes are then reflected immediately on the website using the Joomla plugin. The plugin lets members view events by day, month or year with a nice AJAX based interface.
To promote the honeybee and the association's activities we agreed to implement a picture gallery of the members' best beekeeping images. This was another feature that was perfect for Joomla and it's thousands of available plugins. The gallery plugin is an AJAX based thumbnail viewer with lightbox style enlarging pictures and extra navigation tools. Members can use an online form to upload images to the Webmaster, who can vet them and add them to the gallery. The form also includes CAPTCHA anti spam software.
The new site was unveiled at the CBKA Annual General Meeting at the beginning of March 2010. Feedback has been very positive and the members are getting used to updating the website themselves, which is keeping the content fresh and up to date.
I will perform a few search engine procedures such as checking keywords, meta tags and submitting a sitemap to the popular search engines.
The next step is to point http traffic from the old www.cbka.org.uk domain to the new cambridgeshirebeekeepers.org.uk domain.
We will then be working on supplying usernames and passwords to the 300+ members and also a 'store locator' style plugin to allow members of the public to find their nearest swarm collecting beekeeper.
All in all a very nice project to work on and a great group of people to work with :o)
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