Further reading
Below is some further reading to accompany the Developing a community rail website presentation by Mike Parker-Bray, Citizens’ Rail Communications Officer, at the 2015 Citizens’ Rail final conference in Torquay.
Establish your website objectives
This is the bedrock of making your website focused and effective. One of the best writers on this area is Paul Boag – check out this blog post (also available as an audio podcast) which offers a great introduction.
Write for the web
Here’s a handy article from WebCredible that sets out how to write text for the web. In terms of the visual side of things, check out this thought-provoking experiment by Paddy Donnelly about how it’s OK to let your content breathe and to have long webpages if needed. And if you’re keen to employ eye-catching graphs or charts about your line’s successes, check out Infogram, a free way to create them without needing any graphics expertise.
Test it out
Two giants in the world of user testing are Steve Krug and Jakob Nielsen. The former has written two excellent short books – click the covers below to find out more. Rocket Surgery Made Easy is particularly useful as it explains how to carry out the kind of user testing talked about in the presentation.
Jakob Nielsen is the source of the guidance given in the presentation that testing your website on just five users will unearth the vast majority of problems with your site. Read his article on this topic.
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Extra titbits:
How we built this website
In case you’re interested, the Citizens’ Rail website was built using WordPress, combined with the Limitless theme. We used the same combination for The Riviera Line website.
Slides from the presentation
