The Celtic & Irish Cultural Society is pleased to announce that the long required overhaul of the www.celtic-irish.co.uk website has now gone live.

The new website is actually a cosmetic overall and many of the services that used external providers, like the photos section, has now been fully integrated onto the same Internet server as the website itself. Similarly, the resources section has been fully integrated into the installation such that users can, from the same screen, add news, pictures, movies and resources. Cosmetically these will be displayed differently but adding information should be greatly simplified for committee members of the society.

The website is powered using community created software known as WordPress. WordPress began it’s life as a blogging platform but was quickly transformed into a full content management system (or CMS) by web designers looking to provide easier updates for its owners. Anyone can set up a blog, kind of like an online diary, at wordpress.com but because we host our software elsewhere, we can do a few more things that even some of the larger websites do like integrating directly with FaceBook.

Integrate with FaceBook you say?

Absolutely, or twitter, or digg, or stumbleupon, or any number of online services. You will find these images on every page of the new website and some of the logos will be easily recognisable to you. When you are reading any of our news items, or photo albums, or resource articles you can quickly click on one of the items to add it to your FaceBook wallpost or send a twitter update. Or, you can copy and page the webtitle into sites like FaceBook and a preview of the document should appear. But hopefully, this is very familar to most of our users by now. If you want to update to somewhere else, you may find the last icon an interesting button to press. This will bring up even more options.

What about FaceBook?

You may know that we have a FaceBook Page and this too has be integrated. On a couple of the pages, you will notice that the the latest updates appear on the left-hand side of the page.  This allows us to update you with various news from around the globe and ensures that it is more closely linked to our site but with information that isn’t directly related to our activities locally so isn’t quite appropriate for our news items.

I like your website…

Well thank you, so please tell your friends. You will notice that at the bottom of each post or article page the a new button has appeared. You may find common interests with your friends. If any of your friends have already “liked” any content their names and sometime photos will appear below. Hopefully, you’ll find out that friends have the same interests as you and, therefore, you’ll be able to chat about some of our activity too or get involved directly with what we do.

Did I hear you say ‘movies’?

Yes you did, if you have been on the site recently you may have noticed that many videos have been added to the website but now they are easier to find.  Like most other websites, we use YouTube (owned by Google) for this service. This means that not only are we able to show our own videos, but we can also link to other users videos from some of our events. So if you have any and would like to share them with the community it would be great to hear from you.  You can either use the contact page or send the link via our FaceBook Page. We can then simply copy and paste the link onto our site and hey presto! We’ve done this in the past to link to short movies. This will allow us to all be part of the Irish experience in Crawley and the SouthEast.

And Photos?

Absolutely. These can be updated with the the website administrators who can upload pictures to the website. If you have any, please use the contact page or email us at admin@celtic-irish.co.uk with pictures. These images are for web display only and will be shown at lower resolution than when printed. So please resize the image to a maximum height or maximum width of about 750 pixels. This will also make the pictures smaller for delivery by email.

And Resources?

Our resources section has been developed to provide information of interest to our site visitors and specifically to those in the south-east of England. This resource will continue to grow we invite contributions about everything and anything Celtic! Whatever you fancy! If you would like to submit some information to our pages, you just need to contact us or email admin@celtic-irish.co.uk with pictures. We will then add the information and attribute it to you. If you wish to get more involved, thereafter, we can even provide login details so you can add more content in future.

I sometimes forget to visit the website?

Another advancement of this website is the ability to distribute news globally via RSS (Really Simple Syndication). For users, it means that you can keep up with our news through a Newsreader or on your dynamic homepage (such as iGoogle – the personalised Google homepage). Information is automatically updated so you don’t even have to visit the site to know there is new news. You can even grab the icon and drop it onto your toolbar so you can see when content has been added. You will find the link on a number of pages and also in the toolbars of your Internet browser.

The Celtic and Irish Cultural Society is committed to developing new ways to reach out to the Irish community living in the southeast of England and have implemented a number of systems to make this possible.

Just watch this space for even more exciting new content. Or better still, subscribe to the RSS Feed!

So why the changes?

For two reasons:

1. They were needed and long over due.
2. The time it took to update the old website took too long.

The website was first put together by David Nolan, and you may see  his name appear in a few places in this website, some years ago but the way it was set up made it very time-consumming for him to update and near impossible for the rest of us unfamilar with web design or all the technical aspects of the WordPress system. As David was working full-time with plenty of overtime he was unable to continue and has since relocated to New Zealand – some way away from us all here.

The way it is now setup will make it possible for users with a limited knowledge of webdesign to update and add new information.

We are also looking for someone who would be happy to take over some of the administration of the website.

So what’s in the future?

As Doc Brown poignantly reminds us during the Back to Future triology, “[the] future hasn’t been written yet… The future is what you make”. So its all down to you. We must not forget our past or our present as we move toward the future and we can only do that by working together. So we invite you all to come on board and help us move forward.

We would be particuarly interested in aspiring or established historians, economists (I’ve just watched the news), journalists, photographers, moviemakers and internet literate administrators for the website to volunteer and help us. But we also need people to help plan events and get involved in organising the Irish Festival, Fleadh and Parade. So please contact us to get involved.  If not, just come and enjoy the events and spread the word.