The Chetham Society is the oldest historical society in North-West England, founded in 1843. The Society publishes editions of important and historical documents relating to local and regional history.
I redeveloped The Chetham Society’s website to make user friendly in editing the content, and also developer friendly in adding new future functionality.
The Chetham Society required a Google Books link adding to a specific publication on their existing WordPress website. However, while trying to edit the pages, the website broke not once, but three times. The site was built in such a way that it was impossible to add new functionality without it breaking, especially with all the outdated plugins. It was also confusing because it utilised WordPress's Gutenburg editor and also a plugin's HTML/visual editor, so both of these would clash which is probably why the site broke.
I recommended that in order to add links and other future changes, the website would need to be redeveloped, which is something I don't take lightly, and was the only way to futureproof the site and allow the changes that The Chetham Society needed.
The redevelopment is a WordPress site with a custom theme, built on modern technologies to achieve the same design.
I used HTML Sass CSS Bootstrap and BEM to produce a pixel-for-pixel recreation of the existing design, whilst also using my initiative to make informed improvements and corrections to the design - fixing issues such as inconsistent spacing and on-hover animations (or lack thereof).
ACF was used for greater customisation, easier content management, and allowing future changes. I made sure that at least 99% of the content could be edited by the client.
The codebase adheres to many development principles including DRY, DOT, and separation of concerns, and I also took the time to document the code so any future developer (including myself) can add or change functionality with ease, knowing what each function does.
During development, it dawned on me that they're not using any form of ecommerce to sell their publications, just a contact form. After pitching to the client, I developed a custom Stripe Checkout integration using PHP JS Composer and jQuery. It is a dynamic per-item checkout that sets the price as set in ACF.
OOP was used for the entire Stripe integration, and the API keys were defined outside of the content directory for security. It was interesting to research and implement, and I also created a fun little order confirmation in the style of a book animated opening up to reveal a thank you text.
I added a webhook to capture when an order is successful and retrieve the customer delivery details sent from Stripe and add them to a private custom post in the WordPress backend for ease of use.
I loved working on this project, it got me to explore and use lots of WordPress hooks and functions to customise the Admin and add some bespoke functionality. It's was a pleasure to work on the project for The Chetham Society.
I am very pleased to provide a testimonial for Stuart Norman. I am the General Editor of the Chetham Society, a publishing society which produces books about the history of the North West of England. Stuart worked on the development of our Society's website. He was responsive to the brief we constructed, helping us to understand what was possible and appropriate for us. He was consistently responsive and helpful in answering questions about the project. All the work was completed successfully and in a timely way. The guides Stuart provided, and the presentation of the site, were straightforward and pretty intuitive. And he was reasonable in his approach to scoping and charging for the project.
— Professor Tim Thornton General Editor 2024