Web-design for Beekeepers: Beeinformed.org Has A New Look

Beeinformed.org has a brand new look! I’ve been working on Version 3.0 of beeinformed.org (a.k.a the supersedure release) off and on for about 6 months and I am happy to be able to release the new look of our website to the public.

Beekeepers, like anyone else, often have the need for a website of their own and I’ll give some advice on managing your own website with WordPress, but first, what’s new in Version 3.0?

Here are some highlights.

• Improved identification of blog authors. We have at least 8 active blog authors and now when you search or browse, their happy faces identify their posts. On their individual blog pages (see list right side bar), they can now manage their own blog.
• Feature images for posts.
• Official result releases of this project, like journal articles and management survey reports are branded with the BIP logo and organized in the menu above.
• The homepage provides a constantly updated stream of results and blog posts all searchable or you can browse by tags (list in footer).
• Using your phone or ipad? The new design responds to different screen sizes for improved readability and is ‘light weight’ to work quickly on mobile devices.

Web-design for beekeepers: Using WordPress

The bottom dollar

Beeinformed.org is built on WordPress, the open source, freely available content management system. We host it ourselves on leased server space which can be had for less than $8 per month. What is not free or cheap however is the ability to re-program the system to suit your own unique needs. So, two routes are normally taken when making a new website with WordPress. One is to use the default installation (or something close to it), and two is to create a new theme and functions (or highly modify the default theme and add new functions which is what we did). A good estimate on cost to design a site similar to this one is about $10,000, or at least that was a realistic quote we received. That is for the website design, NOT the content. However, we (The Bee Informed Team) were able to do this in-house for considerable savings. Unless you want to edit the code in Figure 1, either use the default theme or increase your budget. Or, if its just a personal site for you to blog, you might try the completely free blog hosting service at wordpress.com, but your site may not have the search engine visibility or flexibility needed to market your business.

Figure 1. Some computer code from the back end of the site. To make a great deal of changes to the design of a WordPress site, you need someone that can program in PHP, CSS, and has basic knowledge of MySQL databases. To make smaller changes to the default WordPress site, programming is not necessary.

Using your WordPress site

Figure 2. Back end of beeinformed.org, showing the content editor window built in to WordPress.

WordPress gives yourself and co-workers a way to update the content (text, photos, documents and embeds) with relatively little understanding about web design. The back-end has a built in editor to publish content easier than typing a Word document. CONTENT and the ability for the content AUTHORS to be able to express their message is the most important thing. WordPress helps this excellent TEAM create a website. The design is only its container.

Its just as easy to manage comments on your site and filter out the spam, if you get the spam filter from akismet.com for a small and very fair fee.

With thousands and thousands of web-site designers able to re-program WordPress sites, your site is portable to different designers if you need a new one. WordPress is built by a huge community of web-designers that make their living designing WordPress sites.

I could go on and on, but there’s plenty of other pages that do that, so…

Examples of Beekeeping WordPress Sites

Here is a look at some other beekeeping related web-sites built on WordPress.

• Phil Craft Hive Craft
• MAAREC
• Romancing the Bee: Making Urban Beekeeping Beautiful
• KIWIMANA’S BLOG, Auckland, New Zealand.

Or, here is a bunch of examples not about beekeeping.

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