Suddenly in March 2020, the world of customers, clients, websites, video conferencing... all became very different!
If you make websites and run internet based services, 2020 was a time of opportunity but it was also pretty scary. You needed to hope that every business that had now decided to *not* update their website due to uncertainty, would be replaced by a company who realised this was now *totally* the time to upgrade and extend their online offer! That thought process was often guided by the type of industry they operated in and the extent of the impact the lockdown and tiers had on that industry. As a small business we had every empathy with those businesses that were caught in an ever increasing number of traps trying to understand what the future holds and how to best position themselves to make the best of what was a very bad lot for most of us.
So "Mooh" felt very fortunate to have been rather busy in this period - working from home had never felt such a privilege. Here are a couple of the highlights!
Part 1 - The Mooh Pet Projects - aka fun not funded!
A number of immediate responses to Lockdown in March 2020 presented themselves very quickly - most immediately was helping clients particularly in schools, update their pages and ensure they were getting the most out of their websites to support and inform users such as pupils and parents. The most fun was had setting up a quick virtual resource site for parents and staff in Sharepoint. Finding resources and making the site friendly for users who were not used to Sharepoint was a great challenge.
However, the best challenge was about a month into lockdown when we worked with SARA (Stradbroke Archive & Records Association) to build a real time archive to collect village experiences during the pandemic. The site is an Omeka site, with a very different focus compared to the other Omeka archive sites SARA runs. This site is designed to collect resources directly from the public - so required a lot of thought about how to make the process easy for site visitors. Other than a one off extremely odd error due to the use of an emoji in a submission, making the site was great fun and the submissions have been fantastic!
Have a nose at Stradbroke in Lockdown at http://pandemic.stradbrokearchive.org.uk
In Part 2 - If you want to get ahead, get a haircut (booking system)....