Our Website Story
November 2009 News Flash !!
In October the website was changed over to Joomla! content management system. I was able to create a template design for Joomla! identical to the previous website design. New features include 'breadcrumb' links at top of article for navigating back to previous pages, and 'search' function, to search whole site for the search term and return reference links to articles.
We have received many compliments about our web site. The web site was developed by myself, Helen Snee, and has evolved to its present
state over 2 years. I was contacted by Lyn Holdsworth in August 2007 after being referred by Colleen Miller, whom I had assisted
with her Victorian Flora websites.
The original Friends of Toolern Creek website was
comprehensive, but previous webmaster was unable to continue working with it, and I was very keen to find a project to develop my web
skills, while studying Software Development.
More about Helen ....
The colours of the header image from the original website were used to select a design template (XHTML/CSS tableless) that would be visually
appealing (free to download from www.styleshout.com) and, matching perfectly, the winning logo from the Logo Competition was used for header and footer images.
I was able to use most of the original information to make up the basic pages (copy and pasting from the original website), replacing outdated
information with current.
The Photo Gallery
Lyn was very keen to be able to display the photos of the groups activities, before and after photos of the reserve, of the volunteer groups who help, of special events and festivals, and the flora and fauna of the area. As the website has limited space to use for images, we found an excellent photo gallery website, which hosts any amount of images at no cost (for non-profit organisations). I was able to customise the photo gallery website to match the main website.
The Birds of Melton Story
The members of the group are keen bird watchers, and had developed a list of 200 bird species sighted in the areas of Melton, Toolern Creek and Eynesbury. This list was a text document, included bird category and used colour coding to denote the location of the bird sighting. A corresponding Birds of Melton CD with photographic images taken by Nora Peters was also available. For the Birds of Melton page, I used this information create a database originally in MS Access to hold the bird lists, category and locations for each bird species. The web host supports PHP and MySQL (programming language and database), so I used this to create the page, which includes an admin area for adding/modifying/deleting bird records and images easily. A recent addition to the page is the link to the Birds In Backyards Bird Finder identification tool for quick additional information.
The Events Calendar
The Events page contains the Friends of Toolern Creek calendar. I had seen on other sites good use of the Google Calendar to manage events. You can create an account with Google Calendar at no cost, log in to create calendars and events. The calendar is easily embedded into a website. It displays weekly, monthly and agenda formats with good navigation. If a visitor to the site has a Google calendar account, then they are able to add any event to their own calendar, or add the Friends of Toolern Creek calendar to their list of calendars to show in their account.
FoTC Update Electronic Newsletter and Mailing List
Lyn receives email notifications of news, events and publications of flyers and documents from local and regional environment community organisations, which she emails
to the members of the group.
FoTC Update is on the News Update page and was developed to try to reduce the time and internet resources that this consumes.
This page outlines any new changes to the website, new photos added to the galleries, news items about the group and community events occuring, any documents to be downloaded.
It has links to other like-minded websites, and links to download newsletters of other environment groups/organisations.
The electronic newsletter is sent out monthly and has brief outline of the items on the FoTC Update page to notify members and interested people
about the changes to the website. To manage the newsletter I used PHPList, a free to
download newsletter manager. The email newsletter is created in PHPList and is automatically sent out to our currently 81 subscribers (names and email addresses held in PHPList).
