Workers' History Museum Webmaster
The Workers’ History Museum is a not-for-profit organisation based in Ottawa that is dedicated to the development and preservation of workers’ history. Their goals are to present, promote, interpret and preserve worker’s history, heritage and culture.
The Workers’ History Museum placed a public advertisement for a technically competent individual to help them maintain their established WordPress website built with WPML and a collection of other plugins.
Sitting down with two representatives of the Workers’ History Museum (Sanna Guerin and Cydney Foote), we discussed what immediate changes needed to be made to the website. Prior to our meeting I spent some time browsing the website assessing issues that I felt would result in a poor user experience. Together we prioritised these items and I provided estimates for completion of work.
I was informed that an accidental update of WordPress had resulted in some website down time, and that a lengthy endeavour had been undertaken to have the hosting company restore an automated backup. My first task was to gain control over the backup and restore processes using a Dropbox account and the UpdraftPlus plugin. This plugin provided the ability to backup Plugins, Themes, Uploads and the Database to an off site location such as FTP, Google Drive or Amazon S3.
After establishing a backup process, some of the other changes and minor bug fixes were as follows:
- Alter main menu to automatically display the addition of new pages
- Update French translation for some missing text snippets
- Modify slider to support multiple image sizes
- Update page headings so they are all consistent
- On a few occasions there have been problems with the website due to authors submitting new content, which I resolved as soon as humanly possible. These issues were trivial in nature, sometimes the result of an orphaned HTML tag.
Responding to committee member’s desires for an updated organization image, the organization brought me two new potential website templates. I assessed the advantages and disadvantages of each, and then created mockups of each template to allow necessary parties get better idea of how the website would appear. These mockups can be seen below.