Website for a Car Club

Website for a Car Club

Author
Discussion

Autolycus

Original Poster:

67 posts

142 months

Tuesday 17th January 2017
quotequote all
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.

Edited by Autolycus on Tuesday 17th January 20:07

anomie

75 posts

112 months

Tuesday 17th January 2017
quotequote all
I cannot answer any of your questions at all... but, can suggest perhaps using a service like guru.com to get "bids" from freelancers who may be a good fit for your requirements

feef

5,206 posts

182 months

Tuesday 17th January 2017
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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

jonamv8

3,145 posts

165 months

Tuesday 17th January 2017
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what sort of budget do you have for the work as this would steer my advice to you as you have a number of options with + & -'s

jammy-git

29,776 posts

211 months

Tuesday 17th January 2017
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Happy to throw my hat into the ring, this is the sort of project I've been dealing with for years now so could offer several options or just give general advice.

Autolycus

Original Poster:

67 posts

142 months

Tuesday 17th January 2017
quotequote all
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.


48k

12,981 posts

147 months

Wednesday 18th January 2017
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This is something that I do as well so feel free to PM me if you want an additional quote. As above there are numerous possibilities, it depends on budget and what the devil is in the detail.

Autolycus

Original Poster:

67 posts

142 months

Wednesday 18th January 2017
quotequote all
48k - private emails don't seem to be accepted. If you'd like to pm me, with an email address, I'll pass it on to the project manager. Thanks

treacle

194 posts

216 months

Wednesday 18th January 2017
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Autolycus - sent you a PM, have done a few similar projects

tpalmer

78 posts

98 months

Thursday 19th January 2017
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Very similar to a recent project we have completed – Have PM'd you OP.