Tell us about your organisation and why it needed a good website
The East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists Society has been around for a good long while, long before the internet was invented (not quite a hundred years, but getting there). We’re still playing catch up and this was our second attempt at going digital. Our membership and audience is mainly older, so we needed a website and hosting with hands on support. We wanted a web presence that encouraged new members to join and participate in the programme.
Houston we have a problem!
We found it difficult to manage and maintain our first website, in no small part because we never got to grips with its capabilities. It quickly became disorganised and was always out of date. We realised that a new site would help us renew our offering to new and existing members and organise our immense assets into a new digital library.
Our archive of 30 volumes of the Transactions of the ELAFNS were being digitised and to be made available widely and freely available to the public for the very first time.
We realised that we could also promote our lecture and field visit programme easily beyond the membership. A recent talk attracted over 60 individuals.
How did Ourlocality help resolve your problem?
We needed their hands on help to extract and re-organise the existing content, take a backup of the old site, and then we needed to claim the domain back and have that side managed closer to home. We also needed to be able to structure the transactions volumes and create a basic catalogue, so we asked for tools to help us manage, display and then be able to search the new digital archive, using a programmable search engine restricted to the transactions.
What would you say to others?
It works well for us. We have limited in house expertise with website management and realise there is more to it that a bit of fancy design.
Help is available, not quite 24/7 but never far away.
And how much did it cost?
We are now on their £144pa plan for hosting, which includes domain management and space for future uploads of ther Society’s Transactions. We also needed a volunteer to learn the ropes and on the back of our related project, https://el4.org.uk we’ve had a number of hours of further training. We have recently decided to pay for additional support, a half hour monthly, which reduces a lot of the stress of managing our programme.
