It’s a new website!
After many months of planning, designing and testing we bring you this shiny new, mobile friendly, website. Thanks goes to Michael Johns for helping with design and content and to the committee for scouring over it and picking up various errors.
You may have seen glimpses of this new look with the Facebook page and group sharing the same ‘hero’ shot header image. It’s part of a unified theme for the club’s on-line presence.
Further content will be added in time but if you have anything you would like to see added such as more places to ride and local knowledge then please let us know.
The old site had a good innings lasting from ~2008 through to 2015. This is an extraordinary long lifespan for a website and sadly it was showing its age and was also a popular target for hackers looking for an easy exploit. Thanks goes to the efforts of past admins who selflessly worked to set it up and keep it going.
For the geeks there’s a few interesting things about this website…
The site lives on a virtual machine running within the Google Compute Engine Infrastructure. We chose to use their Ghanghua County, Taiwan, Datacentre, however it is rumoured that Google will be establishing an Australian Datacentre next year so we’ll float it over when it is ready.
The domain name is hosted by the CloudFlare Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. This speeds things up across the world while also offering a level of security from the aforementioned hackers. The site will perform equally well no matter where you are accessing it from – although the majority of our audience will be from Australia.
We’ve changed from using the Joomla Content Management System (CMS) to WordPress CMS. WordPress is used on over 10% of all websites so it’s pretty popular and well supported.
For future reference, here’s how the old website looked:
The old Bushrangers Website 2008 – 2015