Welcome Business Lunchers!

The site is very new and has just launched to a beta group of users. This will allow us to see how real uses interact with the site and we’re looking forward to seeing how the beta launch progresses and how the site is used. At this stage it could be useful to provide a bit of info about the site and what it’s designed to do.

The site is built with the leading blogging platform WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org) and the community site plug-in BuddyPress (http://www.buddypress.org).

The blogging platform allows us to publish posts and organize content into categories and groups, and the community features allows site members to interact with each other online.

The community interaction works along the same lines as any other online community that you might already be familiar with.

You can create a profile (adding your personal details, uploading a profile image etc), log in, request friendships with other users, post status updates, send messages to other users, create and manage groups etc.

The site’s admin members are able to post details of upcoming Business Lunch events and to provide online registration, which will of course make the event booking process a quick and straightforward task.

The success of any online community does depend on the activity of its members. We hope that we’ve provided all the tools necessary for Business Lunch members to actively participate in the community.

It’s important that every member is able to take something positive from the community.

So if you have an idea for a blog post, or if you wish to set up a group, or if you wish to publicise an event of your own, for example, then that is all possible and your input is not just welcomed but also invaluable to the success of the project.

So get involved, start to use the site and let us know your feedback!

As you probably know, The Business Lunch is run by Jonathan Goodman and Corrina Mills of the Spectrum IFA Group.

This web site has been put together by us, digitalhappy, and you can find out more about our web design and development company at our website http://www.digitalhappy.com. My name is Simon and you can see my Business Lunch profile here and my colleague is Matt Casey and you can see his profile here.

Feedback is welcomed. There will certainly be bugs to fix so please be patient and let us know if there is anything that you think we should look at, or have any comments or ideas that you’d like to share with us.

We’ll start a blog post thread for comments and feedback and you can also post your thoughts there too. (Comments msut be moderated and so can’t appear automatically but the site admins will endeavour to approve comment as quickly as possible.)

If there are problems to report, please always make sure to tell us what browser (Firefox, Safari, IE etc), browser version (IE9, Chrome 10 etc) and platform you’re using (PC, MAC, iPhone etc) – that will help us to know how to check your feedback.

A quick note on browser support: the site should work fine on any good modern browser. This effectively means IE8+ and modern versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox. (If you’re running IE6 or 7 then you may not have a great experience on this or any modern web site.)

A final note about the design of the site. We’ve used a restrained colour palette with an idea of keeping things ship shape and business like. We want this to be a showcase for your content and not for our crazy design skills. Once we’ve got some real input from everyone, can see some usage of the site and have a better idea of how people are using the site, we can look again at the design and see if there are any changes that could work well. But that will be in a secondary phase once we’ve got some feedback to work with.

The site has a responsive layout. If you haven’t heard about Responsive Web Design, then you soon will! It’s a technique that allows us to build sites that respond to the users available screen space. You can see this in action by viewing the site in your desktop browser and clicking and dragging to reduce the window width. Or if you’re viewing on a smart-phone for example, then you’ll see how the content is presented via a layout that is better suited to smaller screens (and it will also adapt of course depending on whether you’re viewing in landscape or portrait mode!).

This means that we’ve had to make quite a lot of user interface choices in the design and layout, and if anyone has any suggestions or feedback, please do let us know.

And if you’re still making users of your own web sites zoom in and scroll around tiny desktop-targeted fixed-width websites, well you can always <shameless plug>speak to us</shameless plug>.

Looking forward to seeing the site in use.

Simon