Last week I handed the site over to the folks at Holy Rood Church. They were very happy with the results, at least that’s what they told me!
The new site was created and developed on an inexpensive online host that allows pay monthly, rather than having to purchase a whole year, which would be silly. I would have staged the site on the Church’s current provider, but that option wasn’t enabled on their hosting package.
It was created entirely with WordPress, which I was already familiar with, but got to know quite intimately. The design and layout were my creation, I started with a pre-built theme, but I edited it so much it was custom by the end. A client from the church added and edited some content to tailor it to their liking too. It is fully responsive, which happened pretty much out-of-the-box, however it needed a little tweaking.
The clients wanted a Facebook feed on the front page, which cause me a lot of headaches. I discovered that there are no free plugin options that are up to what was needed. I’m sure the paid-for versions are superb, but I have no budget. I discovered a way to embed a Facebook feed on a site using Facebook Developers code. This has quirks that are slightly not so great, and Facebook don’t seem to be maintaining the code, so a hack or two was needed. It’s all working well now.
One thing that I had overlooked towards the end was site security. I already had the site running through Cloudflare but realised that more could be done. So, I installed a firewall for the site and in addition added a Cloudflare captcha to the login page. I set the firewall rules to be balanced, but on the strict side as every miscreant and their dog knows how to get to a WordPress login page. I believe this admin entry page can be changed/obfuscated, but I have the whole thing locked down tight as it is.
There are one or two wee things that I would like to alter/tweak, or that I could have done better or differently, but, on the whole, I think it’s turned out well.
