For the past couple of months myself and a friend have been developing a new website for our local Bahá’í community. We started with a document passed to us via the UKs office of Public Information, which immediately required we change our domain name.

Our original domain name was bonut.org.uk, which stands for Bahá’ís of Newcastle upon Tyne, which actually sounds very unprofessional and a wee bit silly. So we have moved to NewcastleBahais.org.uk, we wanted NewcastleBahais.org, but this was taken by a community in a small village in the US which is also called Newcastle.

It was recommended to have our site built using the Jimdo service, which would have cost us £60 a year, not a lot some might say, but we figured we could do better, for free.

There is one site up that uses the Jimdo service, BromleyBahai.org.uk, and it looks pretty good, but looking at it in some detail, we figured we didn’t need the Jimdo service, we decided to go with a Wordpress based site.

Wordpress is a pretty decent open source blogging platform, but it’s also a pretty good Content Management System. Its easy to use, very flexible with a wide range of plugins and extensions, its appearance is also very customisable with a wide variety of themes which can all be altered if you know a little HTML. I use Wordpress on this blog, and so does the UK Baha’i news website.

One big advantage is that with minimal setup, you can use MS Word, and OpenOffice.Org Writer to publish articles, Microsoft also produces the excellent Windows Live Writer which is extremely good at this. So combine these with the excellent Wordpress Dashboard, and you have a fantastic bit of kit that can be used by anyone, no need to know how to code HTML.

Now for content, we have decided to go with some static basic info, trying to give a little background on the faith and what we do, but for in depth stuff directing them to the relevant info at Bahai.org. We have place the blog items in a news section, where we are publishing local news items, in order to bulk it out a bit, we are also using a plugin to republish relevant news items from news.bahai.org and Bahainews-uk.info.

We have also used Google Calendar to publish our calendar on, this is a brilliant tool as its so easy to update and we have been able to pop an upcoming events box in our sidebar and using a clever little redirect, the sub-domain calendar.newcastlebahais.org.uk, is our calendars’ homepage.

While we have been doing this, we have been looking at all the ways we communicate with the world at large and keep people updated, on what we do and our events. We have had a Facebook Page for a while, which is working ok, and we are learning more and more how to make better use of it. One thing which we have put to good use is our Twitter account @newcastlebahais, now you will all no doubt know, that I love Twitter, its a great tool and can really work well at keeping people updated on what your doing.

We have got our Facebook page and our Twitter account linked, so that whenever we update the Facebooks Page status or add a new note etc, it updates the Twitter account, which is nice. The SMS updates that you can get with Facebook and Twitter are both pretty good, but I will have to write a guide to help people make better use of them.

One unintended consequence of doing all this is that we have had to develop a consistent, for want of a better word, “brand”, which we can use across all services. My wife is a pretty fair artist, and has designed a simple logo, it’s a nine-pointed Bahá’í star, which is black on the outside and blue on the inside. Originally it was black & white, Newcastle’s colours, but it was a bit too dull, so she added the blue, and it’s worked quite well. It’s only a temporary thing; I am sure in time we will come up with something brilliant and catchy and Geordie.The hardest thing has been keeping the site a Bahá’í site, but at the same time local, and locally relevant, this has been hardest to do when it comes to the banner. The Bromley site is a banner with some local landmarks, none of which I am afraid to say stand out for me, as someone who hasn’t visited Bromley in maybe 9 years. So we have tried to used some of the great symbols of our city in our banner and try and make it well, a Bahá’í banner as well. That is something we are still working on.The site is now pretty much complete on the engineering side, just got to sort out the static content and I think we are pretty much done; hopefully we can get it launched in the next few weeks.I shall keep you updated, and let you know when we launch.God BlessMichael