Charity Project

To our pleasure, we were approached by The Somerset District Miners Welfare Trust for charity web design that allowed them to get more exposure on the history of coal mining in Somerset and to show people in the area all of the work that they have been doing to try and get their message out.

The website also needed to build more understanding amongst the residents of Somerset about what happened in the mines and what the miners’ lives consisted of.

While the trustees knew that they wanted a website, they didn’t really know what they wanted on the website, how it would be laid out, etc. Our job was to come up with a plan and establish the best way of getting their information and history onto the site in an easy-to-use method, while also categorising the information into sections.

We felt that it was also important to make the site extremely user-friendly and easy to navigate, based on the demographics of the people likely to be using the site.

Due to there being a number of categories of content, a platform that would allow us to create custom post types and a customisable CMS was needed. So, we opted for our favourite platform, WordPress.

WordPress works well as we can configure custom fields, post types, and categories. This allowed us to set up custom filtering and sorting for the news content, separate the “Metal Miners,” and have another section just for their radio programme.

Within the website content management system, we set up the following post types: News & History, Radio Programme, Metal Miners and Member Events.

Through the use of PHP and Advanced Custom Fields, we were able to setup and develop a bespoke filtering solution for the news and history section of the website.

Visitors can now sort and filter content based on the year, type of content, or a search. We felt this would be a useful feature to integrate as it makes finding content extremely easy on the website, which was very important for the audience that we were targeting.

The trust had recently completed a year’s worth of radio programme recordings that were broadcast live around Somerset. After the programme had finished, they wanted to allow people who hadn’t yet listened to be able to listen to them on their website.

Using WordPress and various other technologies, we integrated an audio streaming system so that the radio programmes could be listened to at any time by anybody.

There were a lot of other features that we integrated too, like group event posts, the ability for visitors to submit any content that they had, and much more.

You can take a look at the website yourself and explore all of the features that we developed for this website: somersetminers.com

After some lengthy discussions with the group, we devised a plan to keep the site live “forever.”

It was a concern that the website would eventually “run out” due to the age of the miners and making regular payments for the server hosting. We came to an agreement with the trust and are providing our assurances that the site will outlive our directors so the world now and the world in the future can learn about the coal mines in Somerset and the impact these amazing people had.