Website Case Study – Henley and Grange Historical Society
The Henley and Grange Historical Society is a volunteer organisation with an aim of recording and archiving the local history of the beachside suburbs of Henley Beach and Grange in South Australia. It was formed in 1979.
In June 2022 we met with the small team of 5 who were leading the website makeover for the society. It was clear from the meeting they had a lot of information (40 annual journals) and a lot of photos. Often as website developers we are in a position where there are not enough photos and there is uncertainty about the information. Here was a website that was going to be the exact opposite!
One of the things that stands out about the process in developing this website was the team’s collaborative effort in making decisions. At some point not everyone is going to be happy with the decisions and hopefully the team are strong enough to work through the differences of opinion, because in the end, decisions need to be made. This team worked well together and allowed for our opinion and advice to also be part of the mix.
Highlights of this website, from a development perspective were:
- Creating the homepage banner
- Use of blogs to categorise, display and tell stories
- Display of, and access to 20 annual .pdf journals
- Timeline
- Gallery of photos
- Events including Heritage Walks and Presentation Nights
Homepage Banner
There is often a struggle in finding a great photo from the homepage banner, but in the case of the Henley and Grange Historical Society, there were plenty of great ones to choose from. We were able to use the styling of an old fashioned poster (the Henley Life Saving Club) from the photo to generate a name badge to use on the bottom left of the banner image.
Blogs to tell stories
The site went live with 12 stories with the team adding more stories after the website was launched. They have access to, and made good use of, video and audio, as well as photos, to tell stories.
Blogs are out-of-the-box WordPress functionality. In other words, WordPress is optimised to cater for blog writing. As part of the development process we designed a blog landing page that suits the character of the site and the organisation.
Blogs are usually the easiest part of the website to train new editors, and in this case, we were able to train volunteer members of the team to create their own articles to keep the site live and fresh with new content post launch date.
.pdf Journals
Each year the Society publishes an annual printed journal. There were 20 journals to be published on the site, some as big as 70MB. We needed to ensure the hosting for this site was big enough to cater for this.
Each journal can have up to 20 or 30 stories. The team wanted a way for people to search on a topic or word and find a story from a journal on that topic or word, if there was one.
In the development we provided an index functionality that allows for this search. Below is a screenshot of a search on the word “tram”. You can try it out for yourself here.
Timeline
timeline is an interesting way to display historical information. We can’t take credit for this work. Roger Edmonds, a talented member of the Society’s team, created this timeline using Knightlab. We were provided with the iFrame code to add this onto the page.
Gallery
Many websites have galleries. They can be used to display products or constructions such as fences, walls or doors. To make the gallery easier to search, the Society categorised their gallery into 4 topics
- People
- Places
- Landmarks
- Transport
A search is also available on the page to search the gallery by topic or word.
Events
The Society has many events, especially during South Australia’s History Festival.
This website did not require payments or ticketing, but they did want the event to automatically disappear from the website once the date had passed.
The volunteer members of the team are able to update the events on the website with the training provided by us during development.
Wrap Up
Overall the site was quite complicated in that it had a lot of information to display and make available to the public. A number of techniques were used to achieve this. You can see the site for yourself here https://henleyandgrangehistory.org.au/.
Marie Hagen, President of the Henley and Grange Historical Society, was kind enough to write up her experience of the site’s development.
The Henley & Grange Historical Society had the pleasure of working with Fiona and Richard at DIY Digital on our recent website upgrade project. Our new website is not only visually stunning, but also functional and easy to use.
From the outset, they demonstrated exceptional communication skills, ensuring that we always knew what was going on with the project. They always were willing to take the time to answer our questions, explain technical concepts in layman’s terms, and guide us through the process of populating the new website with our content.
I would highly recommend Fiona and Richard at DIY Digital to anyone in need of two talented, communicative, patient professionals who are willing to work closely with their clients to realise their concepts.
You can read the full testimonial here.
