A brand new site focused around disability issues for families within the Conwy County Borough area.
This is a site I developed through my day job with a local council. The project has involved colleagues from social services, education services, and health.
The disability network has two main strands. Firstly, it’s a way for services to gather information about what people need, so that they can plan more effectively for the future. Secondly, it’s about sharing relevant information about other organisations and groups, events and so on.
A website to bring this all together seemed like an obvious thing to do.
A blog for local disability issues.
It was natural to include a blog section. Old fashioned newsletters are, well, just old fashioned aren’t they? One of the main advantages of a blog is that many contributors can be set up (various people can log in to write blog posts), and it’s immediate. You don’t have to wait until the next quarterly newsletter, by which time your news item may well have passed!
Fully bilingual website (English and Welsh) for the local community, using WPML
It was important to be able to deliver content in both Welsh and English on this site, and using [bl id=”663″]the fantastic WPML plugin[/bl], this has been relatively straightforward.
Every visible bit of text on the site exists in both languages, and has been human translated. So there’s nothing glitchy or clunky, as you might experience with an auto-translated site. I highly recommend [bl id=”663″]WPML[/bl] for making your wordpress site multi-language capable.
Organisations database, made with Toolset.
The site includes a searchable database of local and national organisations, categorised to make it easier and more intuitive for people to find relevant sources of help and advice within the Conwy area.
I built this using the excellent [bl id=”1314″]Toolset plugin[/bl] (Types and Views)
Each organisation exists as a separate custom post containing the name, description, logo and other key bits of information like their website address, facebook page, twitter account, phone number and so on.
The Search function retrieves the appropriate records and they’re displayed in a custom view, with full control of the styling. This is all made possible without programming, using [bl id=”1314″]Toolset[/bl].
I’ve dabbled with some more complex and interactive ways of filtering the listings, using something called Isotope. The video below explains a bit more about that.
Events database (Modern Tribes)
Initially, I built a very simple Events listings feature, again using [bl id=”1314″]Toolset[/bl]. But as time went by, I decided that I liked the free version of Modern Tribes Events Calendar quite a lot, so I integrated that instead.
And more…
There are lots of ideas for this site in the pipeline, and it’s developing in response to feedback as we go along.
I wanted to write this post to highlight the flexibility of the [bl id=”1314″]Toolset plugin[/bl] in helping to bring some of my ideas to life. I am not a programmer, and before using Toolset, I would have not known how to create more elaborate functionality such as those outlined above. If you’re intrigued by Toolset, please leave a comment or question and I’d be happy to reply.
[bl id=”1314″]Visit the Toolset website[/bl].