Archives Association of BC launches new website

Published Nov 18, 2011

The AABC website has re-launched with a new design in honour of Archives Week 2011 and the second anniversary of Memorybc.ca. This project was made possible through NADP funding from Heritage Canada, Library & Archives Canada, and the Canadian Council of Archives. Through an RFP process, the AABC executive selected Andornot to design the new site and migrate the current content.

As part of the mandate of the project, the design incorporates elements of the Memory BC look and feel, with the use of the same header image and colors. The AABC logo was also updated to a more modern style. The structure of the site was re-organized to group pages under 5 main headings and all the content was migrated and reformatted. Older newsletters were converted into PDF’s rather than trying to retain over 900 HTML pages and images.

Old site

New Site

Behind the scenes the site uses the open source Umbraco content management system and is hosted by Andornot. Individual members of the executive and volunteers now have rights to edit specific sections or pages, and to upload documents into a Media Library. The WYSIWYG content editor allows them to easily type in content, or to copy and paste from other programs. No knowledge of HTML is required as stylesheets control the formatting.

The home page is now automatically populated by recent entries from a news blog with an RSS feed. The same approach has been used for positions listed on the Job Board. Umbraco offers a Publish /Unpublish date feature so jobs can automatically be set to disappear after the closing date.

Redesigning and migrating a site with so much content created over many years presented some challenges, and we are very grateful for the responsiveness of the AABC executive to our suggestions and recommendations.

“Our site needed updating for many years. The new site is much more user-friendly and is very easy to edit. Information is easier to find for our members and users, and will allow more control and diverse functionality for the AABC executive and contractors. We really like our new logo and how much the overall look and feel matches MemoryBC.ca. Andornot’s knowledge of the BC archival community helped to make this project run smoothly.” Jane Morrison, AABC President.

Please contact Andornot for more information.