Collaborative website for a volunteer-run society

The London Art History Society needed a new website that the volunteer committee could update easily, thanks to careful structuring of custom post types and custom fields that encouraged content re-use. The Society wanted some continuity from their previous website, and we endeavoured to maintain the subtle sense of humour present in the choice of artworks for each page. All artworks can be appropriately captioned / credited too.

Volunteers organise the Society’s events calendar, and the site needed to offer an efficient way for the committee to draft, check, finalise and then publish events, so we built a clear private > public workflow:

The committee is organised with a simple hierarchy of editorial roles so that more experienced people can help new volunteers. We used our Fabrica Dashboard for WordPress plugin to make the multiuser site easier to manage, and to help editors see what content have been added or changed, by whom.

The committee was given a two-hour introductory training session on how to use the site, and updates are regular and well-managed.

A goal of the site was to attract both new members and new volunteers, and chairman John Dunlop informs us that it is doing both and that “the general feedback has been wholly positive, so I for one am delighted.”