The Kirkendall Neighborhood Association (KNA), located in Canada, was due for a redesign. The original site was a custom WordPress site, and the association decided to keep stay in the WordPress ecosystem. We moved forward with a fresh overhaul and a change of hosting providers.
Description
The previous KNA website was outdated in look, feel, and performance. Specifically, menus were overcrowded, the site theme was outdated, and hyperlinks were broken or missing altogether. The navigation was also very difficult – finding relevant information was a challenge for site visitors.
The purpose of this project was to build a new website using WordPress technology to provide visitors with current, reliable information about the Kirkendall neighborhood. The site needed to A) be user-friendly and B) bring in more traffic to share information and provide community resources.
Since KNA updates the site’s content at least once per month, they required access to the site content via the WordPress dashboard – this required training the appropriate members of KNA to use WordPress for posting, and for helping them get settled into the Cloudways hosting experience.
Highlights
Team Training
Towards the end of the project, I worked with a handful of KNA members to train them to use WordPress dashboard, Cloudways, and their Rackspace email accounts. This let us close the project without ongoing webmaster costs – their staff was able to continue managing it on their own.
Cloudways Migration
I originally developed the new website using WordPress.com (a novice mistake), and then realized I wanted to host on Cloudways. Luckily, Cloudways provides a migration tool to copy over content from any existing WordPress site. I used their tool to successfully move all the new pages and posts to the new hosting provider’s server.
Cost-savings & Simplicity
Since the site is fairly low-traffic, we were able to explore options at the lower-priced range for KNA. Our choice of Cloudways at about $14/mo and Rackspace mailboxes at $1/mo each was economically feasible for KNA, being a non-profit, volunteer-run organization. Above all, the simplicity of Cloudways’ managed hosting made training the KNA team much easier.
Technologies Used
- Cloudways Hosting
- WordPress
- Rackspace Mail
- Mailchimp
- Adobe XD for mockups
- Microsoft Teams (meeting with KNA representatives bi-weekly)
- Google Cloud for maps API