While we’ve been locked down and unable to travel freely to the hills and wider countryside I’ve been spending a lot of time neglecting my own website, writing and photography in order to get the new Outdoor Writers and Photographers (OWPG) website up and running.
However I’m really happy that this complex new site is now fully live. It has lots of useful extra features for members (which require a login) such as a members-only forum and our OWPG Advice Notes page but you can see the majority of the site without a login.
Why did I end up with the task? Well, the OWPG is a non-profit memberhip organisation, where the members subs have to be spent carefully. Website costs nowadays have soared into stratospheric levels for anything beyond the simplest of sites (which this is not). So with five-fig sums being quoted for a re-build of the old site, which was creaking painfully at every update, there was no choice but for me to give it a go and see if it was possible for someone half-way technically competant to learn sufficient to complete the task.
And although it’s taken a year of my “not-so-spare” time, and has been both thoroughly enjoyable and had me roundly cursing the laptop, the site and website software in general when things (often) didn’t go to plan and required a rethink, I’m glad to say it seems to have worked out ok in the end!
Meanwhile my own website has rather suffered from neglect. Once I’ve recovered a bit from the efforts of the OWPG site, I really must put some effort into updating this one – thanks for your patience in the meantime!