helen caldicott

Helen CaldicottI’ve long been an active proponent of both caring about what you do and doing what you care about.

One way I have of showing this is to provide pro bono web services to deserving clients.

I consider myself fortunate that this can range from websites for local community groups with which I’m involved, like scouts, soccer and nippers, through to a couple of websites for Helen Caldicott, probably the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner and an Australian, to boot.

I had been planning to migrate Dr Caldicott’s site from a static site to WordPress in a fairly leisurely fashion when it suddenly became important to get this done pronto.

What happened was, of course, events in Japan where natural disasters had highly deleterious effect on the Fukushima nuclear power stations. Naturally, this made many people want to re-examine the words of those who have warned of such dangers for many years. Dr Caldicott was instantly in high demand for comment and analysis and people flocked to her website for background information and news updates.

When I say “flocked”, I mean traffic went from 25 visitors a day to 1,000, where it still hovers. Fortunately, the hosting account I have with Crucial Paradigm was able to handle this with ease but it did mean that I had to fast-track the site upgrade.

As a result I didn’t re-design the site very much at all, just moved it to WordPress and set up a few things to take advantage of what plugins can do for a site.

There’s a fair bit of work to do yet, but I think everything’s working pretty well.

This means, of course, I will have to weave some similar magic for Dr Caldicott’s other website I host, People for a Nuclear-Free Australia.

At least it’s for a good cause.

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