UKMoths - a website for British Lepidopterists

[ian]

http://ukmoths.org.uk 

Hi,  I launched this back in late 2015 but just decided to post it here.  It's a complete rebuild in ProcessWire of a site that's been running and growing for at least 15 years in one form or another.

The site aims to illustrate all of Britain's moths (not quite there yet!), and despite the obscure subject matter, gets quite a lot of traffic.  Hence I've used ProCache to keep things snappy and I'm pleased with the performance. There are over 7000 photos on the site.

I should say that the design is not mine, but a purchased template.  It took a while to find a template that I thought could portray these under-appreciated creatures in a good light.  

The most challenging aspects were importing all the data and images from the old system, and getting aspects of the search to work in the way I wanted.  The best part is that it's so much easier to add new content!

Thanks for ProcessWire, and thanks Ryan and everyone else in the forums!

Cheers,

Ian.

[dragan]

Beautiful work. Very clean design and nice UI. Among many things, I like the search results display option "View text-only results for this search" and "View thumbnails for this search".

How many pages do you have? Google shows "About 48.000 results" when searching site:.ukmoths.org.uk 

[tooth-paste]

It looks nice. How did you handle retina images? The photo's look very sharp on my macbook. 

[kongondo]

It took a while to find a template that I thought could portray these under-appreciated creatures in a good light.  

This gave made me chuckle. Pun intended? Moth => light, LoL

Lovely site, very snappy. How are you handling the data, each moth is page?

[DaveP]

Nice work, ian. You should submit it to the showcase.

I love seeing these data-heavy sites and how well-suited PW is to their creation, and as ian says above, more importantly their maintenance.

[ian]

How many pages do you have? Google shows "About 48.000 results" when searching site:.ukmoths.org.uk 

Thanks dragan,  I'm not sure how many pages there are in Google index terms but there's around 16,500 entries in the pages table.  There's a lot of pagination going on too and I think some of my old stuff is still indexed.  PW handles it all with no problems though.    

[ian]

It looks nice. How did you handle retina images? The photo's look very sharp on my macbook. 

Nothing special as far as the photos are concerned.  I do usually spend some time optimising the photos before adding them to the site.  Of course the 'best' ones feature on the home page!  The logo is the only retina-enabled image as I recall, using css and @2x background pngs, but that logic came with the template, not really my work.

[ian]

This gave made me chuckle. Pun intended? Moth => light, LoL

Lovely site, very snappy. How are you handling the data, each moth is page?

No pun intended - but now I wish I had thought of that!

Yes, each moth is a page, and in fact each photo is a child of the 'moth' page, so has it's own page too.  This is a historical thing - lots of other sites are linking directly to the individual photo pages from the old site, so I made the new site replicate that structure albeit now with friendly urls.

It probably would have been a lot simpler to have the photos as a repeater field in the moth template but I needed individual urls for these external links.

Nice work, ian. You should submit it to the showcase.

Thanks Dave.  I submitted it but I think it's still working its way through the system.

[sgt.blikey]

That's weird, I was looking at this site about a year ago. What a metamorphosis.

[tpr]

Sorry, this site is apparently full of bugs