Newport Pagnell Town Council

August has been a busy month here at Pink Fish as we look to launch another new website.

Although we normally work in the South West in towns such as Swindon, Newbury, Abingdon and Bath, we are often asked to work further afield when existing clients recommend us to new ones.

We’d been working with Woughton Community Council in Milton Keynes for a number of years and were asked to tender for the redesign and redevelopment of neighbouring Newport Pagnell Town Council’s website.

The existing website was an ageing .NET website with a fairly old design. The site wasn’t responsive and performed poorly on mobile and tablet devices. The architecture needed a good overhaul, there was a requirement to take online card payments for hiring meeting rooms and the whole site needed to meet W3C WCAG Level-AA accessibility standards.

We were only too happy to apply our full design, consultancy and wireframing services at the start of the process to flesh out a new architecture and plan how best to offer a meeting room booking service.

The whole site, including the booking form and payment process, is built in WordPress and PHP, making really good use of WordPress’ default Gutenberg editor.

In addition to overhauling the website, we developed a custom plugin to allow staff to manage meeting room bookings. Once a booking has been made by a member of the public, system administrators can then take payments, edit bookings, process refunds and generate reports. They can also set certain days to be unavailable for future bookings.

A very slick JavaScript backend builds on a solid WordPress base to make it easy to see who has booked what, when and where, how much they paid for it and whether any monies are still owing.

At the point of booking, hirers are presented with a calendar clearly showing what is available and use a multi-step form to provide the required information about the booking. We interface with Stripe’s API to take the payments.

Covid and lockdown didn’t help the project as we had a number of on-site meetings planned, but we accomplished more or less all that we would normally do in person with virtual meetings and screen sharing facilities for our discussions, reviews and website training sessions with the administration team.