[bev miller]

Please, please can someone take the website in hand and redesign/ update it ?! It’s embarrassingly dated, hard to negotiate,and badly designed.
The front page is still showing details re BoA breakfast which was over a month ago.
Please don’t say ‘it’s run by volunteers’….most bike club sites are and this is one of the worst I’ve come across. It’s not helping to show the Moulton bicycle club in a good light.If we want new, younger members we need a web site that is part of the twenty first century, professional looking and kept up to date.
It’s not that hard !

[David Squires]

If it’s not that hard, why not do it Bev? Be the change you want to see and all that. The point is that anything that happens here is done by volunteers. No volunteers, no web site (however inadequate), no Club. What really isn’t hard is to find fault, say what needs to be done, and then do nothing about it.

[Alexander Johnston]

Undoubtedly it could be improved, Dev, but to do so probably requires the skills of “younger” members with IT skills rather than old codgers like me who are still in the steam age. As David suggests if you have the skills offer to help. Having said that it will never compete with the likes of Facebook which is a huge commercial organisation which collects and stores data on its users. By the way the site is much better that it was: now it may be difficult to navigate but at times it was impossible to navigate.

[bev miller]

I’m not a website designer, maybe someone in the club is ? If I had the skills I would take it on, but I don’t.
The website of any club is not in competition with Facebook, a club’s website is for information about the club and its activities.
FB is like a ‘forum’ only with faster responses!
How about the club having its own Facebook Page ?
Who updates this site ? Or doesn’t lol

[Alexander Johnston]

I think Ansley Brown updates it. Contact the webmaster.

[bev miller]

Should not the ‘webmaster’ look at the website and update it without being asked/ reminded ? lol
I rest my case.

[Aynsley Brown]

Fellow Members. I update the website – when I’ve got something to update it with.

I’m not the web master, he is Pat Doocey, in Ireland. He ‘lifts the bonnet’ when technical things go wrong. Pat is an IT professional and has written linking programs to allow the Club database to be accessed and modified when members renew their membership. The database program is quite old, dating back to the late 90s/early 2000s. It works but it creaks along. The cost of renewing it while still allowing the functionality of the present system, is high. The major constraint in changing it, is the manpower requirement in transferring all the 25+ years of data to a new system. It would not be a push-button job. All data would have to be checked for accuracy. For obvious reasons, Member A’s data must never be muddled up with Member B’s data. No personal data must have any chance of being accessed by the wrong people.

The website ‘outages’ happen when the various component bits of the website – WordPress, PayPal, Google Calendar etc. get out of kilter with each other. What usually happens is that one of them upgrades their program, but doesn’t tailor this change to work with the others. It gets more serious when upgrades by one of the component programs won’t work with the database. This is where Pat is invaluable and has given his time and expertise freely.

Last year, I volunteered to take on the (new) role of Web Editor. I try to freshen it up by changing colour schemes, adding header pictures etc. I very much rely on other members to give me content to put up. When people organising rides have contacted me with ride dates and details, I’ve put them up fairly promptly.

The most recent posting about the Chichester Ride was posted within a few hours of Arthur Smith phoning me and giving me the details verbally. The fact that the notice of the ride was short was, possibly, because Arthur only decided to have the Ride a week before it happened.

If I don’t get content, I can’t put stuff up. I’m not a one-man web-content generator.
I’m also not an IT techie. I don’t know how write modern day programming code and to change the format of the website. I’d be happy to learn if there is a WordPress wiz who would have the patience to work with me.

The website does not have the immediacy and ease of member-access of a Facebook page.
There are already several active and dynamic Facebook groups devoted to Moulton bikes. They allow members to post and put up their pictures easily. The website’s forum pages are used but the limitation of not being able to easily post pictures is a limitation. (It can be done, but the pic has to be stored off-website and linked to within the member’s post. This would put non-tech-savvy members off).

There have been several folk who’ve recently criticised the Club website, often with understandable frustration. This particular thread has Bev Miller’s thoughts well aired. Let me know, Bev, what specifically you would like to see happen and I’ll see what can be done with the resources and skills at my disposal. Please don’t say “just update it”. The only way to do this is to post more content and push the most visible posting ‘down the page’. If I take off the most recent (and outdated) item, the previous (even more outdated item) takes its place. If you’d like to give me content – say a ride report on the Chichester Ride, if you went on it – or something else Moulton-related, I’d be happy to put it up.

I’m not trying to smother constructive dissent. Please let me have your suggestions as to what you want and I’ll see what I can do; but I need your constructive input.
Yours in Moultoneering, Aynsley Brown

[bev miller]

I think you’ve answered it…”The database program is quite old, dating back to the late 90s/early 2000s. It works but it creaks along.”
Thanks for your reply Aynsley. My main gripe is the old fashioned design….

[Aynsley Brown]

Hi Bev, perhaps I should have made my explanation clearer.
The database is not the program that controls the look of the website. The database stores the data for each member – their name, their full postal address (very important for sending out ‘The Moultoneer’), their email addresses (if they’ve given one), their username etc. It is probably the most important part of the Club’s web presence because of all the very valuable membership data stored in it.

It may be very old and creaky, but over the years it has been adapted by Pat Doocey, our webmaster, to interact with the WordPress program that is actually the ‘face’ of the website. He also wrote software to allow PayPal to interact with it.

Our website is a very clever ‘bolting together’ of several programs – the WordPress program, the database program, the PayPal program, the Google calendar (for Events), an anti-spam program, a viewing-statistics program and probably a few more I haven’t encountered yet.

It is theoretically possible to change the look of the website. The problem is if we do and it stops working because one of the dependent programs doesn’t want to work with another, how much will it take to fix it? The whole website and its interactivity could come to a grinding halt.
Not being an IT specialist, I’ve – rightly or wrongly – taken the view of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
If we have a dedicated IT specialist in the Club with the time to work on the website, I’d be very happy to work with them to improve it.
Best wishes, Aynsley

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