BACN

Project Description

I’ve been a member of the Bay Area Consultants Network since 2003, and a board member since 2005. As the board geek, it’s my job to manage, maintain, and create the website–though I did not build the original Joomla site.

I’d moved the BACN site from Joomla to WordPress in an epic site upgrade in 2013, involving multiple custom post types and custom taxonomies. One of the problems we had with the Joomla site was navigation: we had a lot of valuable material from past meetings, but no one could find anything.

I wish I had not used the Types plugin to create the Programs, Creating Connections, Bits & Bytes (soon to become “Life Hacks”), and Members’ Forum post types and associated taxonomies, because the metaboxes have gone funky. Fixing that (my preference would be to re-create the post types and taxonomies manually and handle the custom fields with ACF) is not in BACN’s budget at the moment.

I might also change event plugins if given the project to do over again, though there were not as many options available in 2013. Event management is an important part of the BACN website: the group’s monthly meetings in San Rafael are its raison d’etre. We discussed handling event registration ourselves, but decided to continue using third-party services. (BACN has gone from Acteva to Eventbrite to EventSpot from Constant Contact. All have their pros and cons, but if you’ve read my article about the eNews widget, you know my opinion of Constant Contact.)

That site used a Genesis child theme called Fashionista, which wasn’t responsive but had an appropriate magazine layout. I had discovered Daily Dish while working on another client project (stay tuned for the portfolio entry) and thought it would make a suitable upgrade. It was a comparatively easy job to change themes, though I needed to update the single and archive pages for the custom post types.

Web versions of the fonts used in creating the BACN logo are not freely available, so I just kept the default theme fonts. It’s appropriate that the heading font is called Alice: there’s an Alice on the BACN Board.

I didn’t make many design modifications, but I kept the background texture from Fashionista and I changed the red to match BACN’s red (#d2232a).

Other features of the site include a directory of past and present board members and a new online speaker application form (which has made the lives of the Program Committee and the Promotion Committee much easier).

I installed Client Dash in an attempt to make it easier for other members of the Board to upload their own content after meetings, and created documentation to go along with it, but somehow I’m still the only one adding content to the site.