After a lot of planning, designing and preparation especially over the last six months , Seomra Ranga is back with its brand new website. The process to create the new website actually started this time last year when I began thinking about and planning what I wanted from a new website. After three years, the website had become a little tired, and, more importantly from my point of view, was beginning to become a little difficult to mangage by virtue of the vast number of resources on the site. I was finding it increasingly time-consuming updating the site with new resources as well as trying to maintain a proper structure and navigation to the site. I felt that because of the volume of resources on the site, visitors were beginning to find it difficult to navigate the site.

At the outset, I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted the new site to look but I had a number of criteria in mind. As well as some technical issues, I was looking for:

• A Content Management System that would allow me to update the site easily
• A site that integrated Blog, Twitter and the Site itself
• A new and easily understood navigation system
• A new and appealing layout to the frontpage and the whole of the site itself

I knew that most of this was beyond my abilities so I sought the help of some web design companies. Having received a number of submissions, I eventually decided to work with Logis Media, a local company. I felt that they were the only company to interpret the criteria that I had set out and I quickly realised that they shared my vision for the site. I want to express my thanks to Debbie and James at Logis for working with me so closely and listening to my constant demands, questions, queries and requests. While it may seem that I’ve been talking about the new site for ages, it genuinely took this long in order to get it right. We had to spend some time making sure that we were all happy with the design, layout and functionality of the site before I started uploading all of the site content. This in itself has been a huge undertaking, again because of the vast number of resources on the site which had to be uploaded individually and categorised and tagged correctly. After this process was completed we moved from this:

to this:

As you can see, the change is huge and it will take some time to get used to. I’ve been working with the new site for quite some time so I am used to it at this stage. However, I’m sure it will take regular visitors to Seomra Ranga a while to get used to finding the content that they need. I hope that given some time, visitors will become comfortable with the new look, feel and structure of the site. I hope also that visitors will engage a little more with the site and make comments and recommendations. Because the site is blog-based, visitors can make comments on posts and resources on the site and I hope that people will start to do that.  Visitors can also engage with Seomra Ranga through the new Facebook page which has been set up to keep people abreast of new developments on the site.

During the migration process some files may have unwittingly been omitted, so if there is something in particular that you feel is missing from the old site, please let me know and I will try and locate it for you. However, I decided to go ahead with the new site without uploading some resources that I felt teachers were not in a hurry with at the moment eg. St. Patrick’s Day resources and summer resources. These will be uploaded gradually in time. Also, the location of the Christmas @ Seomra Ranga website has not changed so you can find all your Christmas classroom resources there.

Don’t forget to follow Seomra Ranga on Twitter  or Facebook and let me know what you think of the new site.