familyaldred.org.uk
Welcome!
This site is here to provide some idea of how I approach web design. My aim is to develop sites which can be updated by those closest to the action: the people in the organisations concerned. Rather than submitting information to a web designer or a webmaster to update a site, those with the responsibility for organising events, providing news and reports should be able to add them to the site with the minimum of technical involvement.
The design of the site is also important, of course: it needs to reflect the nature of the organisation, lay out the information clearly and in an appropriately structured way, and be compliant with web standards (although where necessary contain 'fixes' for browsers which are not standards-compliant. This page, for example, currently renders correctly in Firefox and Opera, but an bug in some versions of Internet Explorer leads to misalignment in some places: I have not corrected this to keep an example!).
This site is not itself designed to be full of images; it is here to direct you to other sites in which I have been involved. The example sites are listed in reverse order of original creation: you will see that the styles have developed, and that the older sites are in need of (and in course of) being facelifted.
Example Sites
West Bridgford Ladies FC
Probably the most fully developed example of the data-driven approach, the West Bridgford Ladies FC site has developed over the last couple of years. As well as a clean and functional design, it features a 'rolling news' list on the front page, a fixture/match report system which supports the process of a football fixture (providing location and arrival instructions before the match, and a report afterwards) and integrates pictures into text.
Members of the team can log in for additional information considered 'private' to the team (such as additional coaching comments in match reports, and internal news and events). All this is kept up to date by the manager and coaches, meaning that the site can be relied upon for even last-minute changes to fixtures and other breaking news. Whilst the Colts Teamsites (see below) were developed after this one, I use this as my testbed for developing further utility on this sort of site, so it's usually a little ahead of the Colts ones.
West Bridgford Colts FC - TeamSites
Having developed a site for the youth team which developed into West Bridgford Ladies, I have extended this approach to provide a generalised team website for any of the many youth teams run by the West Bridgford Colts. I do not maintain their main club front page, but I do provide the team sites.
Comparison with the West Bridgford Ladies FC site will show an immediate similarity, but in fact there are differences under the hood: the team sites are all driven by the same 'engine' drawing on a single database in which all data is linked to individual teams. Again, 'private' areas are provided, and the is an emphasis at this younger age level on child protection as part of the design. Setting up a new team onto this system is a matter of a minute or two to fill in an on-line form, and once set up the team is automatically listed in the directory of teams.
The NFP Information Site
The NFP Information Site has recently had a facelift, but since starting the update I have agreed with the maintainer of a related site that I will merge his site into mine: this has rather changed the approach as the far more extensive list of documents will demand a different navigational approach. It will also benefit from a data-driven approach, particularly in the resources section, where I hope to establish a group of asociates internationally who will update and add new resources in their own areas and languages. For the moment, I have restyled the site and updated existing documents.
Mumpers
Mumpers Ceilidh Club was one of the first sites in which I made use of the database-driven approach. Mumpers committee members can log in and update information easily. This site unfortunately currently demonstrates a potential weakness of the approach: a website which is not maintained soon visibly dies!
CCL-GB
This site, The Couple to Couple League in Great Britain is in the course of rewriting to adopt the database-driven approach and to incorporate an ecommerce function. I maintain this site myself, but having become used to the simplicity of site maintenance from my own browser, now prefer to set it up on the same basis. The look of the site has become dated, and it is time for a renewal. Most of the work is done, but decisions over how to deal with postage costs are delaying the final relaunch!