We’ve launched a new Napier website. Whilst this in itself isn’t major news, I think that the project highlights some interesting website development issues.
Firstly we’ve moved from a proprietary CMS to the open-source WordPress platform. Although WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, it isn’t bad for small websites, and with only 30 static pages and over 1200 blog posts, it had all the capabilities to meet our needs. Using an open-source CMS also meant that we could do all the website development in-house. Although you still need people with PHP, CSS and HTML expertise, the time required to design, develop and launch a site is much less than the proprietary CMSs that you’d have chosen 5 years ago.
We’ve also moved our blogs into our main Napier.co.uk site. We split up the posts into three separate blogs – a marketing blog, news about us and Napier News – our blog about the electronics design media in Europe. This ensures readers can access the content they want quickly and easily, and you should watch out for more blogs in the future!
Although it’s always interesting to discuss the technology, the main reason we’ve made the change is to allow us to expand an improve the content on our site. We’ve begun posting tip sheets and other information in our Best Practice section, and there is much more video on the site. We’ve also improved our integration with social media tools and will continue to develop our social media presence.
There are a huge number of different tools – both WordPress add-ins and hosted services – available to provide in-depth analytics, optimisation and monitoring. I’ll look at what you can do with some of these tools in future posts.
If you want to know more, check this short video from the Napier YouTube channel where I discuss the choice of website platforms and the importance of content.
