New website NOW LIVE!

Article by Chris Parker – Website Lead, Club Committee Member (and 1969 Puku owner)

Welcome to the Club’s new website… It’s been promised for a while, but it’s finally here!  The first phase in the evolution of the Club’s new website now live!

Last November I was co-opted on to the Club’s Committee to assist Martin Collins with the many club admin tasks.  It quickly transpired that we needed to do something with the website building on the wonderful work of our previous webmaster, Jacqui McCarthy.  Once the existing website was accessed and we got our heads around its set up etc, attention turned to updating it.

I should mention at this point that my day job is a Head of Marketing for a construction company.  Having been a Chartered Marketer for over 20 years, website projects are a familiar task for me.  Therefore, we set to work.  Over the winter months we’ve been running 2 club websites, creating a new one alongside the old one.  Right now, this is the first step in building on the excellent website Jacqui McCarthy had created.  We’ve migrated everything over into a new look, enhanced and refreshed site.

However… there’s much work to do.  We’re busy in the background building more sections and pages to go live over the next year.  For now, the site needed a massive update of its platform, primarily from a technical and security perspective.  We’re up to date and subject to less vulnerabilities.  The forum section has been retired, as its function has migrated to the Club’s Members Facebook page.  Latterly it had become infrequently used by members, and was subject to hundreds of spam and hacker attacks every day.  This has made it unviable while we find our feet with the new order.  However, we’ve got a solid base to deliver something the Club can really be proud of once more.

Members Area: It’s still password protected

As well as the Members Area main page, we’ve made the navigation easier by including exclusive pages for our members throughout the site, – so things are in the place you’d expect to find them.  For example, any browser can find basic model info, but members can further click through to the full model year brochure from the same space.  Pages are password protected, as before.  We’ll continue to introduce this password in our seasonal mailouts.  You should only need to enter this once per website session, depending on your device settings. We suggest you save it if you have a passwords app on your device.

Where can I find the Members Area password?

As part of the website launch, a special launch mailer to all members contains the updated password.  If you have not received it, check your spam email box, or email admin@cheltenhamownersclub.co.uk where we’ll check your current membership details prior to reissuing it directly to you.

Next stop:

New page for ‘SPARES’

Now that the majority of the new site is live, we’ll create an exciting ‘spares’ section, to help keep our caravans rolling.  To do this justice, it will take us some time.  While this work is underway, we’ve created a dedicated email for enquiries which can be forwarded to the relevant member for assistance. spares@cheltenhamownersclub.co.uk

 

The future:

With an updated platform and content management system in place, this enables us to put lots of ideas into the melting pot to help carry the club forward, be it the building of a bigger online resource through magazine/article scanning, online joining, rally and event booking form submission – even thinking about online payments…  Of course, this is all a scoping discussion, all of this comes at a financial cost with strict security and GDPR regulations to protect members.  With the option to at least scope these ideas we can look at ways of carrying the club forward and succession planning for the future, being respectful of, and building on the Club’s legacy.

I hope you enjoy the website as much as I’ve enjoyed creating it.  My thanks goes to all the individual contributors who’ve helped with content; information, photographs, resources etc and special thanks to Tim McCarthy for assistance in the migration process.

 

Chris Parker

21.06.2026