Website for a Car Club
Discussion
A car club that I'm a member of is looking to have a new website developed. As ideas were chucked in, it became obvious that this might ideally involve re-thinking many aspects of the club's use of IT.
Thus there needs to be a new public face, with plenty of information about the cars - history, technical, ownership - as well as enough to tempt new members to join; but also plenty of meat for members to feast on. Most of the material already exists, but is poorly presented and difficult to find. The idea would also be that members would be able to join, renew, and update their personal information through the new site, and some members have advocated a combination of structured data on individual cars with a wiki-style facility for any member to add snippets of information, photos, and so on about any car covered by the club. There are many further features that could be included: event bookings, club shop, latest news, searching club publications and data, classified ads, and so on.
At present the club has Access databases maintained by the club office people, with a crude interface for simple website queries.
Two queries:
Does anyone know of similarly ambitious club websites which work really well?
Can anyone recommend a developer to take this forward?
A spec is being drawn up at the moment, to be followed by invitations to developers to discuss it further.
This is a serious project, with the opportunity for a good developer to influence the direction from an early stage. The budget hasn't been fixed, but it is likely to be "sufficient".
I am not running this project, but will happily pass on ideas and names to the chap who is managing it.
Thus there needs to be a new public face, with plenty of information about the cars - history, technical, ownership - as well as enough to tempt new members to join; but also plenty of meat for members to feast on. Most of the material already exists, but is poorly presented and difficult to find. The idea would also be that members would be able to join, renew, and update their personal information through the new site, and some members have advocated a combination of structured data on individual cars with a wiki-style facility for any member to add snippets of information, photos, and so on about any car covered by the club. There are many further features that could be included: event bookings, club shop, latest news, searching club publications and data, classified ads, and so on.
At present the club has Access databases maintained by the club office people, with a crude interface for simple website queries.
Two queries:
Does anyone know of similarly ambitious club websites which work really well?
Can anyone recommend a developer to take this forward?
A spec is being drawn up at the moment, to be followed by invitations to developers to discuss it further.
This is a serious project, with the opportunity for a good developer to influence the direction from an early stage. The budget hasn't been fixed, but it is likely to be "sufficient".
I am not running this project, but will happily pass on ideas and names to the chap who is managing it.
Edited by Autolycus on Tuesday 17th January 20:07
the likes of Drupal or E107 would provide an ideal framework for this sort of thing, and there's loads of developers out there that can develop, deploy, host and support these platforms.
The benefits of going down the route of open source CMS like these is that if the developer vanishes, it's a well supported and understood platform that another team could pick up relatively easily. With a bespoke system, it limits your options somewhat.
The other benefit is that there are a lot of plugins and modules that gives much of your required functionality out the box, so dev time is limited to customisation rather than writing stuff from scratch
The benefits of going down the route of open source CMS like these is that if the developer vanishes, it's a well supported and understood platform that another team could pick up relatively easily. With a bespoke system, it limits your options somewhat.
The other benefit is that there are a lot of plugins and modules that gives much of your required functionality out the box, so dev time is limited to customisation rather than writing stuff from scratch
Thanks for the replies and advice so far. PM sent to jammy-git. Jonamv8: the project manager cannot disclose a budget while he is still finalising the spec, and it will depend on which options he goes for. "Sufficient" was one car maker's standard reply to questions about power. He's not expecting to get it for a pint of mild and a bag of crisps.
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