Live – online, on message!

It's taken a while, but the new Forest website is now live.

For reasons that are beyond my pay grade, the (outdated) software on which our previous website had been built was not going to be compatible for much longer with the new server to which it had been transferred.

The old server was being decommissioned, apparently, or whatever the technical term is. (It was explained to me but, frankly, most of it went over my head.)

We also had to find a new web designer because our previous one, with whom we had worked for 13 years, had decided to prioritise more lucrative corporate clients, which was understandable.

To cut a long story short, we found a new web designer whose brief was to keep the overall look and feel of the old site but modernise it and make it as simple as possible to navigate.

That, in turn, gave us the opportunity to update some of the copy and delete stuff that was wildly out-of-date.

It's a work in progress – we're still working on the Info Bank section, for example – hence this soft launch, but I'm happy with the way it's turned out.

To be honest, I wasn't sure how valuable it is for Forest to have a website when so many people now seem get their information from social media (a platform we've found difficult to exploit).

Don't get me wrong. I think it's vitally important to have an online presence because the internet is the first place most people go when they’ve read about you or are looking for a smokers’ rights group to contact.

Furthermore, a website says a lot about an organisation (or indeed an individual), but how many people visit sites like this on a regular basis?

It reminds me that in February 2008 I wrote:

January and August are usually the quietest months for websites, at least in terms of visitors. Nevertheless the Forest website still attracted 107,837 unique visitors in January (13.3 million hits). The largest number of visitors in a single day was 5,800 on Monday January 21.

The most popular download in January was Joe Jackson's The Smoking Issue. It was downloaded 2,632 times. We estimate that since it was first published in 2004 The Smoking Issue has been downloaded from the Forest site over 50,000 times.

We're not getting that level of traffic now. However, according to our new web designer, who has been monitoring the number of visitors, the website continued to attract a healthy number even when there was only a holding page while the new site was under construction.

Anyway, you can visit it now by clicking here or on the images above or below.

PS. The first Forest website I had an active hand in was launched in 2003 at a cost, if I remember, of £25,000.

Those were the days when design companies created their own proprietary software and, in addition to the all the design costs, we had to pay an expensive annual licence fee for the right to use their software.

Thankfully the initial cost was underwritten by a third party, but the annual licence fee, for which Forest was responsible, became a bit of a burden and we eventually bailed out of the arrangement.

Today the cost of designing and maintaining a website like ours is a fraction of that, otherwise we would struggle to afford it.

See also: Coming soon - new and revised websites (November 24, 2007), Welcome to our new website (May 20, 2008), and Live and kicking – the new Forest website (March 30, 2011)