The idea of a website for the village of McGregor was born in 1999.  At that time, Rob Phillip (son of Barry and Margie, the proprietors of McGregor Country Cottages), still lived in the village, where he owned and ran what is now the McGregor Country House, but which in those days was known simply as McGregor B&B. 

Being in the tourist trade, as it were, Rob could see the advantage of a website promoting the village.  He also had a regular guest, Mike Hardaker, who was always up for a sing-song, and also just happened to be the editor of Computing SA, one of the larger IT (Information Technology) magazines in the country.

These two put their heads together and came up with the idea of running an article in Computing SA on How To Build Your Own Website, using the McGregor site as an example, a brilliant idea which jump-started the traffic to the site.

At the same time, a small and relatively unknown commercial hosting provider called Hetzner was getting off the ground, and Mike was able to arrange free hosting with them in exchange for a plug in the article.

And that is how the McGregor village website got started.

It was originally developed in MS FrontPage, and the mere mention of FrontPage, of course, makes seasoned IT types roll their eyes in horror.  Few products can have been as harmful to the web industry as FrontPage, which allows pretty much anyone to cobble a few pictures together, add some wildly clashing fonts, upload the whole mess via a wizard, and call the all-too-frequently hideous result a website.  It’s my contention that web development is a bit like performing Mozart – too easy for amateurs and too difficult for professionals – and FrontPage has exacerbated that situation.

But having said all that, it is possible to produce fairly attractive sites in FrontPage if you know what you’re doing, which Mike most certainly did, and he produced a very elegant and effective website in a very short space of time, using a built-in FrontPage template to keep the site harmonious and easy to navigate.

The subscription options were set up, the content collected and added, and we were off at a gallop.

mcgregor.org.za: version 1

Times change

Version One served the village very well for a couple of years.  But times change, and people move on to new phases in their lives.  Rob moved back to Cape Town to follow up an opportunity at the Graduate School of Business, and Mike moved to France, where he founded the extremely successful angloinfo.com website, a resource for English-speakers living abroad.

They got busy and involved in their new lives, as people do, and the entirely predictable result was that the site was neglected for many months.

Since most of the content was (and still is) fairly static, this wasn’t too big a problem, but it was certainly an irritation for people whose details had changed, or whose businesses had expanded.  And so, towards the end of 2001, having been asked by various people if I would step in, I approached Mike and Rob about taking over the website, and they were only too happy to agree.

I thought at the time, and still do, that the site was best owned by a village organization with the resources to keep the content and design up to date, and so I suggested that McGregor Tourism become the owners, but they turned the offer down, and so I became solely responsible for the site.  (In retrospect this has probably been a good thing.)  Unfortunately, Hetzner quite understandably decided at this point that they could not continue to provide free hosting, so I became responsible for all the hosting costs as well!

Version Two

Although Version One was a good site by FrontPage standards, it was nevertheless limited by being locked into all the proprietary and non-standard client and server code that FrontPage uses, so the first (and very large!) step was a full redevelopment to international web coding standards as published by www.w3c.org.  This was more or less complete by early 2002, although there have been several additions and improvements since then.

Thereafter, much as we are doing now, I embarked on a content review, made sure that everyone’s details were up to date, and started bringing new subscribers on board.  And the traffic kept on growing, making us one of the most competitive sites in the region.

mcgregor.org.za: version 2

Version Three

But my life changed as well.  I moved back to Cape Town in mid-2004, partly because my closest friend and canine partner in crime, Sharlene Sutherland, had been rediagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill her in November 2005, and partly because I had been left in a very tight financial spot by a business partnership which went sour, so going back to corporate IT made a lot of sense for both reasons.

It meant, of course, that the time I had to spend on the site was suddenly and severely curtailed, which meant that the site was neglected again.  IT is extremely exciting, but is also one of the most stressful and demanding industries in the world, and as much as possible of the little spare time I had was being spent with Sharlene and Barbara, so there wasn’t really any time left over.  Fortunately the accommodation content on a largely tourism-based site is relatively static in a place the size of McGregor, but it meant that all plans for developing new sections of the site had to be put on hold, and there are always a few people who come and go and need their details changed; and of course, properties get bought and sold (we’ve had a real estate section since the site’s inception).

It’s also impossible to stay in touch with village news when you don’t live in the village anymore.

So clearly, something creative had to be done, and I spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a solution which would avoid the problem of one person being solely responsible for the site, as well as the issue of what happens to the site when that person leaves town or is no longer available to work on the site for whatever reason.  This was particularly important in the case of MOZ as it was developed to professional standards from the start, and as far as I'm aware, with the exception of Robertson Valley Technologies in Bonnievale, there is no one in the region with the necessary skills to maintain such a site.

The eventual solution decided on had two parts:

1. the domain was donated to the Waldorf School, which means that the site is now owned by a relatively non-partisan village organization which has enough people available to update and maintain the content.
2. Web technology has come a long way since 1999, and the logical step was to migrate the site to a software-driven content management system.  This solves the problem of the non-availability of a technical person to make changes, as it allows user editing of pages via the front-end. (If you can use MS Word, you can use a CMS).

In the interim, our little startup hosting company, Hetzner, had come a long way as well, emerging as one of the best commercial ISPs in the country.  They have received a great deal of recognition and numerous awards, including:

+16% market share
TT100 Minister's Award Finalist
Top ICTe Companies Award 
Top 300 Companies Award

In my opinion, they deserve all of it and more; I couldn’t have asked for a more professional and competent service provider.  And I should know; I’ve spent most of my career knocking around in high-end, mission-critical, large-system IT, including a spell with IBM.  Hetzner are good by any standards, anywhere.  They've been invaluable to us, and we hope that with that early advertising plug, in a small way, we've helped them.

So that meant that from a hosting point of view, there were no obstacles to going with a big, best-of-breed content management system.  I did a substantial amount of research, evaluated a few of the top contenders and eventually settled on Mambo, an open source CMS written in PHP/MySQL.  Mambo has a big install base and a very active user community, which makes finding help easy and ensures that there are always add-ins available for custom functionality.

The entire migration project, from installation and configuration, through template development (with the original striped awning look-and-feel), content migration and add-in installation and configuration, and ending with implementation in March this year, took about 7 months, and it would have been much longer if it hadn’t been for the school’s great good fortune in obtaining the services of Adam Lewis, a voluntary worker from the UK.  Adam is technically very capable and has put a formidable amount of work into migrating and organizing the content.  He’s definitely an honorary McGregorite!

What will the future bring?  It’s hard to say, but we do have some plans.  Although the site has always provided good traffic and a professional web presence for tourist-oriented establishments, and undoubtedly always will, we on the MOZ (mcgregor.org.za) team share the same vision for making the site much more representative of the entire community and of using its powerful software features to create a locally based online village which lives up to the green maxim: “think global, act local”.  There is no doubt that we lack sustainable local business and industry in McGregor, and the site hopes to promote initiatives which help to remedy this situation.

We don’t know what the next 7 years will bring; but one thing we can be sure of - they’ll be exciting!

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.