Oriental Arts is a Bradford organisation established for 35 years, bringing music, dance, visual arts and drama to diverse audiences.
The client needed to have a site they could update themselves, drawing from a vast array of stunning imagery generated by the many events they have actively promoted or been involved with, not least the Bradford Mela…
From the Oriental Arts web feature on the 21st Anniversary of the Mela
The ideal solution was to use WordPress, as this provides the kind of community functionality needed to create articles, accept comments, manage news items, and upload photos, text and other media.
I created a special WordPress theme for the site, starting with a design by a talented graphic designer. With some additional coding and customisation, we delivered a site that is easy to manage and provides an excellent show-case for the landmark arts organisation.
WordPress helps the development cycle
The client were very keen to generate their own content for the site, including text and images. Quite often, specifying, securing and managing content for a website can be challenging, especially in larger organisations, but with Oriental Arts they were very quick to supply us with the required assets and initial content, which in turn helped speed development.
Oriental Arts Home Page
A big advantage that WordPress offers when building sites of this nature is that it is relatively quick to get the site up and in front of the client – indeed, with Oriental Arts, having already supplied us with the initial content, they were able to start adding their additional content while we were still working on the site.
This was extremely helpful in the development cycle, as it brought up issues to do with usability, functionality and design, all of which we were able to quickly resolve.
Detail from Mela 21 Coming of Age Article
Handover, training, sign-off and launch
Because the development of the site had been iterative and fully informed by client and end-user feedback, handover was not a huge event, not exactly a formality, but more a case of dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s.
One key phase of handover is client training – and we offered the Oriental Arts 2 sessions for 2 staff, with a week-long interval to get to grips with WordPress on their own. We were delighted that Oriental Arts staff were able to very quickly grasp how to use their WordPress CMS site, and of course they now author 100% of the content that is regularly updated on their site.
We hope to work with Oriental Arts again, to help them take their site to the next stage, and there are numerous options available (video, social media integration, email system, advanced SEO, online ticketing etc). Should they secure the relevant funding – (always an issue for small Arts organisations) we will be well positioned to upgrade the site to deliver even more to the diverse and enthusiastic audiences they serve.
