You may be surprised to find Chandler’s Ford Today website has a new design today.
The colour is now much toned down.
The improvement today has made Chandler’s Ford Today a mobile friendly website. If you read this site using mobile phones or a tablet, you may find the site is now easier to navigate and read.
This morning, Neil Duddridge, whose SO53 web design firm hosts Chandler’s Ford Today, popped in to see me. After an hour’s discussion, we decided to go for this user friendly template, and temporarily let go of the old theme.
Neil (yes, your jumper tells us where you work and live: SO53!) looks rather radiant in front of my Christmas tree.
This new theme is an experiment. If we find this theme is not working well, we could switch back to the old one, or find a new theme.
Our considerations are: cost, and mobile friendliness.
This new theme on WordPress is free of charge. It is mobile friendly, and will certainly improve your reading enjoyment.
We will find out later how to change certain features on this site, such as a new header, and colours. A few old features might have been lost too, but I think in general, this site still functions perfectly.
I would use this opportunity to give you a brief summary of the running of Chandler’s Ford Today.
How much does it cost to run Chandler’s Ford Today?
Last year I asked for your donation for the first time since the site was set up in 2013: The Best Birthday Gift You can Give – Donate to Support Chandler’s Ford Today.
Thank you for your generous support. From now on, I do not need any donation to run this site.
Last year I told you I had spent over £1,000 for this website in over three years (the cost included some mistakes I had made in learning to run this growing website).
In a year, I received a total of £450 in cash / cheques / direct debit donation (see donation details here), including the most recent donation from Chandler’s Ford Methodist Church.
Church treasurer Chris Goodhead from Chandler’s Ford Methodist Church sent me this letter, with a cheque of £100, in late August this year:
“I am pleased to enclose a cheque for £100 from Chandler’s Ford Methodist Church as a donation in support of the excellent work of Chandler’s Ford Today…”
I told you in 2015, Chandler’s Ford Today website cost £220 to run.
I anticipated the cost in 2016 to be £400. However, the cost this year turned out to be just over £100.
For 2017, the cost will only be £68. I hope this stays the same in the next few years.
Neil has dropped the monthly hosting fees (and backup) from May this year to only £5 (previously £15 monthly). Site domain name costs £8 per year. Therefore the cost in 2017 will be £68. The hosting fees are being paid for by a contributor, who pays £5 in monthly direct debit.
I decided not to go for a new theme (US$79 per year) I seriously considered last year, as I decided that free resources should be sufficient for me to run this website. I also consider that in the long term, a low cost website will be more sustainable.
On this website, we use many online resources for free. For example, for photos, we frequently use high quality photographs from Pixabay, and a few other photo sharing sites. For image editing, we do it for free on PicMonkey. To save cost, I didn’t go for an upgrade on PicMonkey either as the existing resources are sufficient.
To conclude, Chandler’s Ford Today will stay as a non-commercial community website, for you to enjoy a clean, ad-free website. We continue to share local stories and events, written my many local writers and contributors.
For those keen readers who love numbers, here are some numbers for you to digest (click images to enlarge).
More stats reviews will follow at the end of the year.
Once again many thanks for our readers, supporters, and writers and contributors, for your support, for reading and sharing, for commenting on the posts.
I’m glad that through our team work, we are able to produce a strong community website for everybody to enjoy. Let’s keep it that way.
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I have really enjoyed receiving emails from this site since I signed up earlier this year and always click on and read them. The new “lighter” website looks absolutely fine. Well done to you and Neil for creating and maintaining such an interesting website.
Dear Mary,
Many thanks for your positive comment. I think ‘low cost’ is important for this site as we can’t ask for money every year (there are more important causes in the world that deserve donations). I also considered moving to WordPress.com (free hosting site) but the data is huge and moving over would cost money for an upgrade, and we would also lose data.
Using free resources is great and everyone could easily set up a site.
I’m glad to hear that you ‘click’ to read our articles. This goes into the stats, and it helps me to see what readers enjoy most. That is also the reason I tried not to show full length articles in an email (but sometimes we would accidentally published article in full via email).
Hope you continue reading and giving us feedback.
My best wishes to you.
Janet, I think the new design looks wonderful. Lovely and “clear”. I think one of the major strengths of CFT is it is non-commercial and glad it will stay that way. And on behalf of us all many, many thanks for your hard work here. It is appreciated by us all.
Allison,
We basically looked at a few themes together, and selected this one – as it appeared to be more similar to our original style.
Our main focus was to get a mobile friendly site – as if we are not, at some point it’s going to affect our search engine rating. This was the main concern. And of course our previous theme was a bit dated.
There are certain things I can’t do with this new theme (don’t forget this theme is free and there are certain restrictions) – but these are minor issues and we could learn to adapt slowly.
I believe we could do great thing with very low cost for this website.
Janet, you have created something valuable for us all. It has been and continues to be a wonderful achievement.
I like the new theme but would prefer the text to have better contrast with the grey background. How would it look with black text? It needs more contrast.
It is nice to have CFT free of advertising and encouraging to know what can be done relatively cost free.
Thanks Mike. We’ll be playing with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) at some point, but it may take a while.
Good to have you all doing all the writing and researching, and sharing them on this website. Many thanks.
Janet, although I no longer live in Chandler’s Ford I very much enjoy reading the articles since I “discovered ” your site a few months back, and also adding my own small bits from my boyhood in Ford.
The new look is very good, straight forward and easy to read for us “oldies “, and “ad” free which is great, well done and hope you continue. Low cost is very important in this day and age, and to manage that is remarkable. Well done!!