Our work with National Estate Churches Network (NECN), an ecumenical charity, continues as their new website begins to flourish.
The latest phase of growth for the website has provided a landing page and news feed for two local NECN branches: Leeds and Birmingham.
Over time, the facility will be rolled out to more local branches of the charity. This furthers NECN’s goal of empowering, equipped and enabling churches on outer estates.
Open Source – Customised
We continue to use Open Source software to give NECN a secure base from which to work, avoiding “vendor lock in” and increasing the “Bus Factor“.
For this project we chose three Open Source plug-ins for WordPress (also open source). We then combined and customised them for the specific needs of NECN.
This way of working means that in the future, if this charity wanted/needed to work with a different company, they won’t have to start from scratch with a whole new website. In other words, they won’t experience any “vendor lock in“.
Using Open Source software also means there can be millions of people contributing to the software you use: all those people creating new things, adapting to needs similar to your own, and of course looking for security problems.
Free Publicity – on your own terms
There are many benefits of providing local branches with their own landing pages and news feeds, both for the branches and for the national charity itself.
National Estate Churches Network gets direct publicity from the local branch pages. People looking for information about a local event or news item are taken directly to the charities national website.
Free SEO – also on your own terms
The charity will also receive a free SEO boost from hosting the local branch landing pages and news feeds. Over time, these pages will be filled relevant search terms and useful content – all without the NECN core team doing any additional work.
This kind of content is specially good for “long tail” search engine optimisation. This is where the site is optimised for a large number of low volume search terms, as well as the small number of high volume search terms.
