Client Overview
The Peckham Townscape Heritage Initiative started in 2015 after the National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded £1.675m to Southwark Council to deliver the project. The Council, as well as freeholders whose buildings are repaired, both contribute to the cost of the works. The THI was the result years of work to promote awareness of the town centre’s historic built environment by Peckham Vision and the Peckham Society.
Project
Peckham Townscape Heritage Initiative Website
Service Requirements
The Brief
Following on from our previous project – Butler Hegarty Architects Website – Claire Hegarty reached out to us in order to initially manage the website for the old website for the Peckham Townscape Heritage Initiative, a committee dedicated to preserving the history of buildings around Peckham, an area in London.
The old website certainly had seen better days and was afflicted with a malfunctioning database, the result of numerous hacking attempts, causing critical errors within the WordPress CMS installed and occasionally resulting in the entire website being down for days at a time.
Although we managed to bring the website back online, functionality was severely impeded due to the attacks and we suggested that a brand new website be developed to replace the broken one. Claire and the rest of the Initiative agreed that it would be the most appropriate course of action, but to also archive the old website and provide documentation on how to post articles themselves for the future.
The Process
Firstly I set to archiving the old website, using a dedicated WordPress plugin capable up zipping the entire site ready to install again at a moment’s notice. Before the archive, however, I managed to secure everything we needed for the construction of the new website – images, pdf documents and even whole posts ready to be moved over.
Design and development of the new website then began immediately as I was already familiar with the layout of the old site. I was able to ascertain the needs for the new website and even wanted to add extra functionality, such as a search feature for users to be able to locate specific information.
Once the layout had been built, I was able to upload all of the media from the old website (virus checked first to ensure that the new site wouldn’t run into the problems of the old one) and, after discussing ideas and re-categorising some of the posts with Claire, built the relevant templates which will enable future users of the website to put together a post with minimal effort. I then used these templates to restore the old posts.
Afterwards, the website was quality checked by Claire and Initiative member Magda Bartosch, with any required adjustments made.
The Result
The website was deployed successfully without any teething issues, thanks in part to the security plugins I installed behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition from old website to new. With a cleaner, more responsive website with improved functionality, it has been a huge success to those at the Peckham Townscape Heritage Initiative with glowing praise from Claire Hegarty.
Once again this has been an exciting project to work on alongside Claire, whose clear instruction and vision for the website helped me develop and deploy it swiftly.
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