Tristan da Cunha Website Relaunch
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new-look Tristan da Cunha website, which we hope you will find better and easier to use than the previous version. It also lays the foundations for further improvements.
The official Tristan website is run jointly by the Tristan da Cunha Government and the Trista da Cunha Association. It was established in 2005 and has become the authoritative website for information and news about the Tristan islands and receives a healthy thousand visits per day. However, it has been deemed necessary to upgrade the site to allow us work with new technology, social media, and to work in new ways.
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Left: New Home Page Above: Old Home Page |
New Features
The first this you may notice is the new attractive layout. The new design displays better on modern computers and devices such as wide screens, tablets and smart phones.
There is a new menu system that appears on all pages that makes it easy to navigate to the information you want, although there is also a new site search facility (powered by Google).
The topic based news pages are now assembled from individual stories rather than being one big page, as before. The individual stories can also be viewed separately, shared on social media, linked to, or even printed out.
All the old pages have been converted to the new site, although we expect that some of the older pages will drop out of use and the number of links slimmed down as a results of the improvements in handling news.
There are a few new pages – the site search page, and the “Take a tour” slideshow of images of the Tristan islands and community.
One of the key operational improvements is that colleagues on Tristan, islanders and expats will be soon be adding new information themselves, without having to work solely through the UK team.
Challenges
Creating the new website has not been without its challenges. The limited internet service on Tristan made it difficult to consult with our island colleagues on new designs. Pages that only take a moment to display in the UK and most cities can take minutes to appear on Tristan, which also slows the speed of discussions.
There was no template for pages on the old website. Therefore, a lot of manual effort was required to transfer them to the new design. Additionally, the more recent news pages had to be split up into individual stories.
Future Developments
The content of most pages have been transferred to the new site unaltered. We will, however, be reviewing them all. One priority will be to improve the new slide show tour with newer and better images.
Now that we have a page template, it will be easier to implement any site-wide changes we wish to make in the future. It also puts us in a good position to improve things further. In particular we plan to implement a modern shopping cart interface for the online store and Post Office.
We welcome feedback on the new website, and suggestions for improvements. A good way to do this is is using our Feedback Form.
The UK Website team - Richard Grundy (Website Editor) and Peter Millington (Webmaster) - wish to thank our colleagues on Tristan and in the Tristan da Cunha Association for their help and advice during this upgrade. We particularly wish to thank islanders Dawn Repetto and Iris Green, the past Administrator Alex Mitham, and Telecommunications Adviser Martin King.