Our websites are completely designed and maintained by ourselves, and specifically by Simon.
I do this as a self-taught amateur web-designer, albeit it’s not something I do as a job generally, but rather, it’s been just for our own creative process.
My main work is as a clinician and teacher. However, on an occasional basis I enjoy the creative process here online because of the subject matter of these websites – the invention and expansion of new ideas, including online, and the evolution of new ways to reach out! We also like fine-tuning these websites in as personalized way as possible, according to our fancy. So I chose to take a “get my hands dirty” approach to our work.
If you have any comments, suggestions or questions on this topic, feel free to contact us privately via the contact page, and/or to write a comment below, and it will be interesting to hear your input, whether as a user and/or as someone who works in web design yourself. This includes if you have any suggestions for the website, and/or if you have noticed anything on this website which is in error or in some way not optimized or functioning correctly.
For years before the launch of this website, I had used html for our various sites, but then I decided that we would try using wordpress to create a new more interactive, user-friendly website, including both a blog and a range of permanent pages which also provide links, then, to our other websites on various topics. So it will be interesting to see how this website develops, and how people find it, including compared to previous versions of our other sites. So far it looks to us like wordpress has helped us to streamline this site better than our previous ones were, as well as perhaps making it more easily accessible, convenient and, of course, interactive with our multi-author blog.
Most of the other websites, which existed for years before this one was set up in November 2010, are still currently in html format, but I’m seriously considering updating some of them to wordpress too, due to various advantages I’ve discovered in terms of streamlining the content in a nice format for the reader, and with access to a range of useful plugins as installed already on this site.
For example, using wordpress plugins I have so far added the functions listed below to this site.
A user’s guide to some of this website’s useful functions:
- Each page with text more than 200 words long has a link that leads to an automatically generated PDF file, making it easy for you to print an article if you want. Unfortunately, not all images and tables present correctly in these PDFs, yet, but the plugin designer (Kalin) says he hopes to address this issue in future upgrades. In the meantime, watch out for this issue before printing things, as you may find you need to print images and tables directly from the original page instead, for a cleaner print of those parts. In spite of this, I think the PDF links may prove useful in general. We also like to encourage our readers to read articles offline, especially longer ones, as this enables us to write for you but while allowing you the opportunity to reduce your corresponding EMF stress from sitting at the computer! I’d recommend printing out our articles and blogs and then, for example, reading them in your favourite armchair, maybe on your porch in the sun with a glass of fresh water in the other hand and a few minutes to put your feet up!
- For longer articles, I have a plugin installed which allows us to add an automatically generated clickable table of contents, to help you navigate to different parts of the article.
- For the header image at the top, I have a plugin installed which rotates it for us between our living-systems-related private photo collection, to provide some visual diversity.
- For the contact page, there’s a convenient contact form plugin installed, and what you write here is delivered directly to us by email.
- For foreign language speakers, I have a translation tool installed so that you can read the website in other languages at the click of a button, and it even allows you also to correct the translations yourself if you find that it has automatically generated something incorrect. Furthermore, I think the foreign language translation settings allow our articles to appear in search engines in many other languages.
- This website design makes it easy for an interactive community blog to be integrated, and I’ve installed various plugins so that each blog author gets identified separately and with a head-and-shoulders photo, profile info, etc. Likewise readers can skip directly to their favourite authors via buttons on the right side that say “Blogs by author” and “Recent by author.”
- We link all of our blogs to corresponding categories according to their topics, which I’ve then ordered in a drop-down menu at the top right of the blog page that says “Blogs by topic” which – together with the search box – should make it easy for you to find your way to topics that interest you most.
- You can comment on blogs at the bottom of each, as well as rating them out of five stars.
- This website has also been conveniently linked to facebook, twitter and the FCT Forums, to help integrate our various services.
