Website and communications improvements

Since volunteering to take on management of London Forum’s website and email communications in November, having become a Trustee at the 2024 AGM, I’ve been making a few improvements, with a few more in the pipeline.

Website screenshot 2025

The aim has been to:

• Better present the information the Forum already has.
• Improve the way we present news and other material in future.
• Improve news emails, and make them more regular.
• Integrate the various strands of news that the Forum produces, so that they can be communicated in a consistent and more digestible way, to members and farther afield.
• Facilitate better member interaction – more on that below.

Richard Farthing

I’ve done much of this by recycling a significant number of tried-and-tested ideas developed over the last few years at the Hammersmith Society, where I’m currently chair. There’s a lot of commonality in what we do, and indeed the technology platforms we use, especially since the Forum’s website was rebuilt on WordPress a couple of years ago.  It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. Here’s an outline of the website specifics:

• Adding new facilities, such as a diary and online event booking – details at the end of the article.
• Generally improving “look and feel”, and in particular address remaining accessibility issues with colours and text sizes – as you can see adjacent. The site is now WCAG compliant for the most part, there remain a few loose ends to address, such as the white text on the picture headings that cause contrast failures, but you should notice significant improvements from the homepage on.
• Improving the mobile experience. A little way to go with this, as it involves some structural work on the headings.  Any AVADA structural engineers out there? 
• Accelerating the existing strategy of moving away from long pdf’s as a regular way to communicate, so that we can update members more often and more concisely.  However, recognising that there’s a significant legacy, I’ve introduced a new and consistent way to display existing pdf’s on the Insights, NewsForum (archive), and What We’ve said pages, with AGM materials possibly to come – screenshot below. We’re reviewing Insights too.
• Creating categories and tags, so that you can search and find related subjects in news, events and elsewhere more easily. There’s a backlog to work through, but since the start of the year everything has been arranged like this.
• Improving website performance with a few ‘tweaks under the hood’.  More to come on that.

Updated Insights page showing pdf images (list option also available)

New website facilities with related communications

I’d like to mention three areas in a little more detail, where significant new features or facilities have been added: Member News, Events, and Diary.  I must also mention the Weekly email in passing.

Member News

New member news page https://www.londonforum.org.uk/news/member-news/

One of the things we’d like to do is to better foster ‘the conversation’, indeed right on the home page, this site says ‘be part of the conversation’, so listening should have a significant part to play.

Through my work at Hammersmith, I’m conscious that members and affiliates are busy meeting with councils, councillors, developers, and their own members, writing important stories for their communities. But in an age of noisy social media, it’s hard to compete with… well Elon Musk for one.  What if we could network, and share our knowledge, more quickly and effectively?  

The start of this is the member news page – a raw and more immediate version of the longstanding edited ‘Around the Societies’ feature of Insights. This automatically retrieves excerpts of news from member society websites able to participate (over 75 so far – representing over two-thirds of the membership) using their public RSS news feeds, providing the top two stories for readers to see, with a click through link to the member’s website for the complete story.  As evidenced so far, members often need make no changes to their websites.  For the one-third that are not yet at the party, I’ll be writing a “how-to” guide that should help support you joining in. Meanwhile if you think we’re missing your existing feed or – heaven forbid – you want your news excluded, let us know by contacting us, selecting the ‘website’ subject option.

Now you can see what’s going on from Angel to…Wandsworth and everywhere in between, all in one place. How many stories? During testing in December, we saw 39 news articles, and over 40 in January, sometimes with as many as 8 in a day.  It’s highlighted a number of common themes, from concerns about Permitted Development… through the many PBSA proposals, housing of course, local plans, to issues about River pollution. Things we knew about, but can now pinpoint more precisely, with an option to explore further without trawling half the Internet. With Heathrow expansion now firmly back on the agenda, a pooling of knowledge could be important for those affected, likely the majorly of members.

We’ve been hugely impressed with the breadth and depth of material, and we hope that this additional avenue of distribution will encourage more.  A word of warning – good things come to those that wait!  If the cache is empty, the page could take a minute or two to update while nothing appears to be happening. Normally, as a live page, you might reasonably expect your published news to appear in about an hour.

This longstanding technology works both ways, and London Forum has an RSS feed in the usual place too: https://www.londonforum.org.uk/feed, to which you can subscribe for automatic updates, as I do at Hammersmith. 

New Weekly Email

At the Member Services Committee meeting this week, we agreed to add selected articles from the Member News page into the mix, ones that we think will interest the wider membership.

You may have noticed that I’ve recently moved member email distribution back to MailChimp, where it was a year or two ago, to both schedule distribution – now on a fixed weekly basis – and to automatically include the news updates from the website in an improved format.  News emails now include our events…

Events

Events screenshot

The existing Events system has been expanded. We can now accept online bookings for free member events, with an automatic email acknowledgement and booking reference. Nothing too complicated, just better using what we have, which as you can see, is a bit of a theme.  The event pages themselves are more comprehensive with details of location, speaker(s) and so on. Available ticket quantity is also shown.

There’s a forthcoming events page and events archive page too.

Events are now archived with their information intact, each on a single page, including links to speakers, with presentations, and on occasion, meeting reports added after the event, so that you’ll always know where to look to follow up.  They are now tagged, using the same tags as our news updates, and will appear in related searches. 

Diary

Related to events above, as you can see on many pages of the site, we now have a public diary of our meetings and other activities. Importantly, the events system feeds into this, and with a little jiggery-pokery and help from Google, events are included in the listings. There’s a new dedicated diary page with a monthly grid.

Whatever next?

What else would you like to see? Notification of TfL consultations? GLA/Mayoral events? Other relevant news from public sources? Which sources?  Perhaps an actual online Forum? A bit old-skool since the invention of social media, but there are still uses for public or private forums focussing on special interests.  AI? Well maybe, but for now, it’s about the membership.