Day 302: Grange Moor’s New Site

All I have done today is sit with the laptop and work on Grange Moor Brass Band‘s new site. There is nothing to show you yet as it is all hidden behind a splash screen at the moment.

After a frustrating start getting my head around the server configuration – this isn’t on a server I’m used to. I know all the ins and outs of the stuff this site is hosted on, along with all my sites. Grange Moor has existing hosting and it’s silly to move. However, certain things haven’t quite worked as I’d like. the plan was to set up the new information on the new host after making a mock site on this server. That didn’t work. It was supposed to save time… Anyway, hurdles were jumped to get to where I needed to be.

I hope that I can share a link with some colleagues for them to give things the once over, and it can be visible to the public by the end of the week. The last big job is to get the various audio parts online and embedded as well as photos that have been built up over the preparation period to the site coming online. The other big changes are a more comprehensive overview of the 159 year history of the band, a general revamped feel overall and  links to Facebook and Twitter. Anything published on the site will automatically get published on both, increasing our audience significantly – the Facebook page has 55 followers at the moment, Twitter reaches a further 235 accounts. Nothing can exist for as long as Grange Moor without being part of many people’s lives; reaching that community is a huge part of what I want to do.

I’ve visited plenty of brass band websites over the past few weeks. They all have plenty of things in common. Quite a lot of them feature poor layouts and confusing structure – some of them are frankly outdated. I want ours to stand out from that crowd. Hopefully I’ve managed that.