The Caravan Club - Lincolnshire Centre
Did you know that Lincolnshire is home to the UK’s largest caravan club?
The LCC approached me in late 2013 to develop a new website to bring their online presence into the twenty-first century. Their aim was to have a website that included a detailed calendar system showing their rallies and meetings. They also wanted the new site to feature an online ticket and payment system as well as being very easy for their webmaster to administrate.
To make the website as easy to manage as possible, I chose WordPress as the CRM. WordPress makes adding new events and tickets very simple. Digitising the club’s tickets has meant a lowering in overheads as well as easier management.
The site is fully responsive, enabling members of the club to view information on their tablets or phones. This was an important inclusion as a large number of views take place during a rally, i.e. on a camp site!
Because the club’s webmaster changes every few years the organisation wanted to consolidate their digital assets, subsequently the website is hosted by me using a dedicated VPS. This means the club doesn’t have to worry about dealing with a web host or managing a server. I look after the operating system and other technical aspects meaning the club can concentrate on being a caravan club.
The server utilises Varnish cache as well as Cloudflare. This makes the browsing experience epic. Loading times are super-fast as well as not being limited by geography. This is the normal setup for new clients of mine - I feel it offers a great quality system that is very cost effective.
A testimonial from the webmaster
The Caravan Club, Lincolnshire Centre is one of 72 regional centers that are run by volunteers to promote rallying for fellow caravan and motorhome members. Our website needed to highlight the events that are held over the year and to pass on news and information. In the past we have relied upon the talents of our committee to produce and control this site, but it soon became apparent that not everyone’s skill set is the same. This became all too apparent when the change over of the Webmaster occurred and very quickly it became a nightmare of SQL and PHP (whatever that means!).
After a tip off, we employed the skills of Jamie Lord who sat very patiently on several meetings listening to the ever-changing needs and ideas that we threw at him. Our remit to him was the site needed to be dynamic, informative, easy to browse and to be future proof. But overall the “behind the scenes” control of the site had to be simple to use as future Webmaster’s IT skills could be limited. Now the site is up and running and I’ve had the chance to tinker with several of the control settings, I have found everything to be easy to manipulate. Although the first couple of attempts did result in the website to crash! Jamie was only a call or an email away and he had things back up and running straight away.
We are very pleased with the new site that Jamie designed for us and it’s reassuring to know that he will be looking after us for years to come.
-Webmaster