debating.org – successes
Well, it’s been nearly a month since we launched the new UCL Union Debating Society website over at debating.org. The old side was a bit of a beast, requiring updating by hand and not really being very extendable.
We (that is, myself and Alex) decided to go with a WordPress installation that would allow us to have static pages describing what we do and rolling updates of what’s going on in the Society, how debates have been and who’s won competitions, in blog form.
Header image on debating.org
It took a little over the 5 minutes advertised – but only because we first had to work out whether we actually did have MySQL on the server and how to use it. Neither of us had been near anything like this before, but once we’d worked that out, Alex had to go and I was left in Gordon’s Café in the Union with my laptop.
I could have gone home and waited for Alex to sort it, but that would have been boring. I unzipped, uploaded and installed. It was blindingly fast. We now have a great website that’s easy to use and update. Various members of the committee have been given Editor accounts so they can update information relevant to their roles.
There are widgets for galleries, events calendars, forms and stats so we can make sure everything we do and want to present is easy to find. Stats are just a way for me to ego-boost. We’re not the busiest site ever, but we do pretty well:
Stats from debating.org
We get around 160 hits per day, according to the WP.com stats widget, based on data since Sept 24th. Our best two days were straight after President’s Cup, one of the competitions we run, which was people looking for the results.
The next step is to go through all the material on the site (a lot of which was simply moved over from the old one) and make sure it’s up to date and relevant to today’s Society, and then start adding more. I want to get training materials up, for instance, so people who miss workshops can still learn.
We recorded this week’s public debate and will get the mp3 up soon. This is something I’m looking to carry on with, so people who weren’t there can still enjoy the Society’s hard work.
So, my thanks to everyone involved, from those at WordPress who’ve made a great product that’s easy to use, to members of my Society who are keeping everything running smoothly.
