Village Hall Website

4 August 2023- The ownership and administation of the Village Hall website has been transferred to a committee member.

An interesting observation that at the time of writing this the index page cannot be found when the site is accessed from a search or a direct link from another website - i.e. the Braintree District Council. This only occurs if you are NOT logged into the Wordpress account.

Accesses to the site are not registered in the Statistics unless the other pages in the menu are selected, as the menu is still visible. The page page to be created displays when the "Search" option is selected - all-in-all very confusing!

Finally! there seems to be some interest in the website. This is not because the webite has gained a lot of visits, rather it has been finally noticed that the URL that was published on many of the village's advertising and on other websites was wrong!

There were a number of communication forms on the Wordpress site but none of them are currently active. The forms, booking for events, are still on the server but not linked to the menu system. This is mainly due to the lack of events at the Village Hall and the fact that I have not been asked to re-instate them.

Wordpress Forms

The "Contact the Hall" form and the forms that had been developed using Wordpress.com are more than adequate for the use of the Village Hall activities.

I spent a lot of time developing my own custom forms that incorporated checks for GDPR and the reading of "Terms and Conditions", but I abandoned this as I was getting no feedback on the forms. Mainly due to the fact that the Hall was closed and there were no events.

Hall Booking Online

This could be a solution for the future, the cost is £10 per month. There are many more features than I can provide and incorporate on the Wordpress site. There is an online calendar, online payments, invoicing and more.

The booking system can be embedded on an exisiting website, but this is a kinda moot point as nobody goes there!

Boxford use , or will use, this service.

If the Village Hall Commitee decide that they wish to continue with the Village Hall Website I suggest that either the Wordpress.com site is sufficient, along with the forms that have already been developed are used, or a third-party solution such as Hall Booking Online is used.

The belchampwaltervillagehall.co.uk Domain

When the Village Hall website started out its life the domain of belchampwaltervillagehall.co.uk was registered.

This was likely a free year domain registration offered by Wordpress.com - the probem with this is that Wordpress then have control over the future of the domain name. After the year is over you will have to pay for re-registration. If you renew your Wordpres subscription you will be able to continue to use that doamin name. If you allow your subscription to expire the mapping of the domain will cease and your Wordpress site will revert to yourdomainname.wordpress.com

In the case of belchampwaltervillagehall.co.uk this then becomes belchampwaltervillagehall.wordpress.com

When you allow your Wordpress subscription to expire the mapping to your "free" domain name will cease and the URL will revert to the yourdomain.wordpress.com.