About:
Another project that spawned from Paul Norcross. You may recall that High Point has run a separate committee from the main of Guilford County for awhile. Guilford County is the more established of the two (it’s a weird dynamic around here, what can I say?). I was approached by Paul and Michael Picarelli at the beginning of the year to take a look at the Guilford GOP site currently in place and make a recommendation about how to make it better.
The previous webmaster used Drupal. Not a bad system, but from my research, it’s really a “developer’s CMS” – very friendly to hack away on, but not very friendly for the average end-user. Case in point, the site hadn’t been updated in over three months when I took over. Calendaring was handled by a Google Calendar feed in a simple agenda format (and sent users off-site for more). There was no events management/registration, limited social media, etc. The real impetus for the change was offering online payment/registration for the County Convention in March 2014 and the ability to offer candidates some “limited” advertising (in the sense that GCGOP has them on the twitter feed).
The re-design was moved to WordPress fairly easily (thank goodness for CMS to CMS compatibility with RSS feeds). There really wasn’t too much in terms of content to move. Like on RPofHP, I feature an RSS news feed from the State and National Committees, but unlike High Point, I’m not having them re-post to the site. The calendar was imported from Google Calendar and now features optional registration for events. The calendar also features category color coding, Google Maps integration, and iCal subscriptions.
Multiple forms abound on the site – Newsletter subscription, volunteer form, routed contact forms, event registration. I’ve even managed to create a few extras so that folks could purchase advertising in the convention brochure.
Address:
Features:
- Home page news slider
- Photo Galleries
- Twitter feeds from multiple accounts
- Social broadcasting/posting
- Localized calendar with event registration as necessary
- RSS News feed imports
- Link library
- Committee chairperson directory
- Responsive (mobile-friendly) design