I have been a voluntary trustee for the East Oxford Community Centre for the last couple of years. I recently felt that I had enough time to put together a new website for them. It wasn’t a hugely big project; I just boshed something together on wordpress.com in an evening. But I think that the results were reasonable. Here are the compulsory before and after pics!
Before
After
I found wordpress.com OK — it did everything that I wanted, but not much else. I had considered using a non-commercial wordpress hosting service, but felt that a commercial service like wordpress.com might offer a little bit more reliability. I’m investigating how to plug it in to different social media services, and how to make sure that wordpress.com does not control all the data.
Strategically, we have agreed to go out and get links, and also to post to the East Oxford blog about once a month. A major concern for the Community Association is that the website not take vast amounts of time and effort. Our trustees are all volunteers and our part time administrator has more important priorities than blogging. That is why I suggested a very minimalist online strategy rather than a huge blogging effort that might end up burning us all out. It will be interesting to see how things develop …