At a special event at The Cardiff & County Club in Cardiff, the new website for the Knight Templar Province of Monmouth and South Wales was launched and went live on 1st September.
It contains many new features which the members of the province will find helpful and it will undertake a number of self-updating functions too which will make the management of the site far easier and thus provide a greater benefit to the members. For example, as each featured preceptory meeting occurs, details of the next one will take its place on the website automatically. The site also provides “How to get there” maps and advice for each of the venues across this very wide province.
At the launch event, the Provincial Prior, R.E.Kt. Dr. Paul Calderwood began by paying a powerful tribute to the splendid work which had been undertaken by the previous webmaster, E.Kt. Dr. Tony Strachan, saying: “Tony’s retirement is a great regret, not least because he created the old website - absolutely from scratch - and he has maintained it so well for the past seven years. We are all extremely grateful to him for all that he has achieved in that long term of office.
“His retirement, however, prompted us to think that the time may have come to give the website a fresh look and it was a great stroke of good fortune for the Knights of the Province when E.Kt. James Forbes Keir and Kt Andrew Newson offered their services.
“James is a professional in the field of website development and Andrew’s background is in technical systems design and management. They have really burned the midnight oil (literally) in order to create a wonderful new facility for us all – and for the benefit of those who are not yet members of KT but who want to know more about our internationally respected and admired Order”.
Founded in 1866, The Cardiff & County Club is a hub for businessmen and others throughout South Wales and, like our oldest KT Preceptory, it recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. Being situated just yards from the studios of Website Express, in Museum Place - where so much of the work was undertaken to create the new website by James and Andrew - it seemed a most appropriate place for the launch.
As the Provincial Prior pointed out: “This is a real Templar Treasure and I have no doubt that all the Knights of the Province will join with me in saying how very grateful we are to James and Andrew for their hard work and generous support of the Order by creating this new facility. One of the great benefits is that the Knight Templar website address remains unchanged although the look and feel of it is very different.”
Website Express was born in 2008, when a group of young IT professionals came together to start delivering better web services, for companies in Wales and the south-west of England. For more information, please go to www.website-express.co.uk