During 2011 the Republic of Ireland branch of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers(CIBSE) were looking for their own web presence and a place where they could share news and events with all of their members and other interested parties. They were also looking for a way to help their members keep up to date with all of the events that they and other organisations host during the year.
CIBSE Ireland are a well organised group – A photographer attends every meeting, so content was not an issue. They also have a busy calendar of events prepared well in advance – so no problems on that front either. Really all they needed was a central place to share all of this information. This was one of the reasons I was able to take on this job – the content will get updated and regularly. And although there is no formal content plan – with the regular events and news updates this will not be required. Much of this is down to the great work that the committee do in organizing everything.
To meet these requirements I built a custom theme around the excellent WordPress CMS. I used a number of plugins to help display some of the content. I tried to aim for a design that would be neutral and heavily content focused and yet responsive to the different devices that would view the website. As the site has a number of sponsors these had to be prominent and available in multiple screen sizes too – Thus ensuring that it wasn’t wasting advertisers money. We wanted to avoid the horizontal scroll bar as much as possible and the responsive design that I built accomplishes this.
News and Event Updates
The organisation wanted a way to update their members on news and also to display information on past events – Most of the time with photographs. For the News and Event updates I created a number of different custom post types. These post types meant that I was able to display news differently to event updates, and also on different pages.
Events and Calendar
The organisation holds a large number of events and awards every year. These awards, in collaboration with the Dublin Institute of Technology, include the Young Lighter and Irish Lighter, the Student Awards, and the Sustainable Design and Research Awards (SDARs). The events they host in conjunction with numerous partners cover a huge range of very interesting topics from LED technology to intelligent buildings.
I was able to incorporate an event calendar into the design and also build on top of a number of event plugins (All-in-One-event plugin) to display the information in a helpful and pleasing manner. It is now a relatively simple process of adding the event once and having it display in a number of ways. I was able to edit these plugins to help break out the information I wanted to.
Visit the CIBSE Ireland site here.
