We’ve just completed www.andrewswalks.co.uk – this is a walking diary for a local solicitor who is also an incredibly talented landscape and wildlife photographer.
The challenge was that Andrew had been creating a completely static website, which over the years had grown to over 700 walks and over 25,000 pictures. Because it was ‘static’, each time he created a new walk on a new page, he also laboriously had to create links to that page across a number of other pages. The software he was using finally became overwhelmed with the size of the site and refused to let him add any more pages – so it was clear that this needed to be transferred to a database-driven WordPress site!
The problem was that this software had created a very messy assortment of code! Most of the images had captions, but in fact these were simply paragraphs of text. We wrote a series of scripts to export the html from the static pages, stripping out the unnecessary code and saving the description, photos and captions in files which we then imported into the WordPress database.
Once we had the the data saved, we could then create summary pages with latest walks, etc. and also a full search function which allows the user to filter walks by region, distance and ascent. So if you want to find a walk in the Southern Lake District, which was more than 5 miles and consisted of an ascent of more than 1,000 feet then that can be accomplised in seconds! The site itself required very little ‘design’ – the pictures themselves are so attractive that we opted for a minimalist approach as much as possible. If you like to walk in the countryside, or just like looking at photos of hills, lakes and countryside, then be sure to visit the site.
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