26 Jan
2010
Photo: David Viner (left) with Ken Hawkins (right) at a social media surgery for West Midlands councillors.
At the end of 2009, Cllr Ken Hawkins and I worked together to set up a new website that Ken uses to write about issues in Elmdon and Solihull in his role as a councillor at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council.
Ken was already blogging on Google’s Blogger platform. However, following a few sessions at a Social Media Surgery, he was keen to do more with his blog both in terms of content and presentation.
I helped Ken by setting him up with a WordPress site, transferring legacy content over from the old blog to his new WordPress site and setting up the new blog layout.
Ken wanted his blog to have a clear layout with straightforward navigation. To provide this, I chose the Grid Focus theme by Derek Punsalan.
Rather than a traditional menu navigation, all the content – posts, comments, contact details and Ken’s tweets – contained within a single page and browsed via categories.
We wrapped up with a demonstration session on using the WordPress admin interface to write new posts, upload images, assign categories and how to manage comments.
Music on
Website is going ballistic, with 1,131 visits in about 10 weeks. It is so easy to use and far better than the previous sites I had. After delivering a leaflet, which has details of my website on it I check on the stats to see the numbers of visits, its as simple as that.
My aim to is to convince more and more residnets to use the website as a point of first contact, allowing me to deliver to those I identify as not being on the internet.
Great work Gavin.
Thanks for the compliments Ken, very kind! I’m glad you’re happy with the site. Hope many more visits follow and the site grows in its effectiveness.