Bodhinyana group
Each week the Bodhinyana group – a group of lay Buddhists and people interested in Buddhism – meet to meditate and discuss Buddhist practice at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in Great Gaddesden in Hertfordshire.
My role
I designed and built the group’s website and have maintained it for the last 3+ years.
The challenge
The Bodhinyana group used flyers and events at the monastery to raise awareness of the group’s weekly meetings. They wanted a website to help publicise when the group was meeting, who would be leading the evening and what the theme would be.
Pre-build
Personas
To help me think about what the website needed and who the audience was I created some basic personas. These were drawn from informal conversations I had had with people while attending events at Amaravati. I saw four types of potential users:
Joe – regular attendee
Joe is in his 50s, lives in Chipperfield, a village not far from Amaravati, and is married with grown children. He’s interested in current events and is involved with Save the Children. Infrequent personal commitments means he’s often available to attend meetings. Joe has a PC at home called “dinosaur” and an older model mobile he refers to as “relic”.
Sarah – prospective attendee
Sarah lives in Northchurch not far from Amaravati. She’s been practicing yoga for five years and is interested in alternative therapies. Her yoga teacher suggested she practice meditation and she is looking to find out where and when. Sarah is in her late 50s with an older child and a career in IT. She has a tablet, iPhone and two PCs and a Dell laptop at home.
Peter – Buddhist online
Peter is in his late 30s and lives in Liverpool. He attends a Theravada meditation group there and knows of Amaravati and regularly listens to the sangha’s podcasts. He likes to read dharma talk transcripts online. At home he got rid of his PC and now only has a Samsung tablet. He uses an old-skool mobile.
Lastly I included Martin the group facilitator.
Martin – Group facilitator
Martin is group facilitator and co-ordinates the themes of each evening’s talk. Martin circulates group handouts and sets the meeting dates. Martin needs to know that events and meeting handouts are online. Martin has a PC at home and simple mobile.
Requirements
Next I created requirements and prioritised these using MOSCOW: must-have, should-have and could-have.
Technical solution
I was familiar with Reg-123 hosting so I purchased the domain name and hosting for the site.
For the first build (in 2013) I used Dreamweaver and HTML4 and CSS.
Risks and contingency
I then considered any risks and contingencies for the project and website. These were:
|
Risk |
Contingency |
| I run out of time to build | Do must-have items first |
| Group facilitator can’t update the website because I’m unavailable | Provide instructions and a log-in. Provide a CMS. |
| Site doesn’t appear in Google search results | Check indexing and sitemap within webmaster tools. Review keywords on pages. |
| Hosting goes down | Keep a local back-up. Select a stable website hosting company. |
Design
So I didn’t build anything that wasn’t needed or wanted I created low-fidelity wireframes and a simple sitemap to share with the group’s co-ordinator.
Build
First iteration
The first iteration of the website met the must-have requirements. It was easy for participants and those interested in attending to find out about group events.
As the administrator one downside was that I had to update the homepage and events page every month or so with the new events. I wasn’t always able respond quickly to update requests.
Feedback about the website from group members was positive.
Second iteration
In 2015 I re-built the site.
This time the build met most of the requirements – not just the must-haves.
I moved the site hosting from Reg-123 to GitHub Pages. This allowed the group facilitator and any keen group members to update and add new pages. As the hosting is free we also saved money.
The new site is built using Jekyll blogging framework which runs off Ruby gems. I created this version of the site with HTML5, SASS, Liquid and some JavaScript. Tools I used included Sublime Text, Git and Grunt.
The site is fully responsive, includes a contact form, automatic take down and archive of meetings, ability to upload meeting hand-outs and add new event leaders. As the pages are static they typically load in less than 2 seconds. I created RSS feeds so that the meeting details could be seamlessly imported into the email service provider and then linked email campaigns to Twitter.
The current front-end can be seen at www.bodhinayanagroup.org.uk and the full code base at the site’s GitHub repository.
