SEND Support Website
Parent Carer Forum Devon is a group of parents and carers who have come together to gather the views of local families whose children and young people have special educational needs across all local communities and feed back these views into strategic meetings to support the improvement of local services in their area.
Key Features
- WordPress
- Kadence
- MailerLite Integration
Parent Carer Forum Devon (PCFD) is the official independent forum for the voice of all parents and carers of children and young people with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities aged 0-25 years in Devon. They listen to parents’ concerns and feed these back to the local authorities in order to improve SEND services.
Their previous website was built using WordPress, my recommended platform. However it was using the Divi page builder plugin and the clients were finding it hard to update and maintain the website themselves. Divi is a very popular page builder but, in my opinion, not terribly intuitive for non-technical users. As a result of their frustration they couldn’t make quick updates and post items of news. The site became outdated and very much neglected and was coming under criticism from the parent carers they were working with, who weren’t aware of all the hard work going on behind the scenes.
Switch to Kadence
My first step was to install my preferred page builder plugin: Kadence. Kadence is by far the most intuitive of all the WordPress page builder plugins and whilst I used the Pro version of the plugin on this website, there is a free version that is still packed with great features.
Content Planning
Together we spent time planning the structure and content of the website and a timeframe was put in place for the client to deliver the content.
New Logo
PCFD decided that as part of this project, they would like a new logo to reflect this reboot of their online presence. When considering the new logo, I decided to keep the speech bubble idea, but added a third one to reflect the fact that PCFD talk to both parents and carers and local authorities. It’s very much a three-way interaction. The strapline “Connect – Empower – Influence” was also removed as it was too small to read and didn’t need to be a part of the logo itself.
Newsletter Integration
PCFD initially used MailChimp for all their email marketing, but once you go beyond 500 subscribers, their plans start to get very expensive. So I recommended that they switch to MailerLite. You still have to pay once you have more than 500 subscribers but it is very much cheaper than MailerLite. You can read more about my thoughts on MailerLite here on my blog.
Training
Just before the site was due to launch I held a training session with two of the directors to show them how to update the website, which they seem to be managing very well already.
