Social Media Powered Website for a Political Candidate in Canberra

Client: Krishna Nadimpalli

When Krishna, a dynamic community leader who wants to “Serve for Empowerment” of communities and support small businesses wanted a simple website, he also had a simple need. He had an active and thriving social media channel (Facebook) and wanted that channel to be visible on his website. I used custom code and selected plugins to display his Facebook Posts, Events and Gallery.

Project Overview

Needs Analysis

Krishna was extremely comfortable using Facebook and did not want to duplicate his effort. I noticed he was extremely active on Facebook and we decided to leverage this. The site needed to highlight his current activities as well as display posts, events and gallery from his social media feed.

Time wasted

The idea was to save time by displaying dynamic Facebook content on the website. When he posted an update on his Facebook page it needed to display automatically on his website.

Social Engagement

Increase engagement between him and his community and volunteers.

SEO

Whilst displaying social media content, we needed to ensure that all of that quality keyword-rich Facebook content from posts and comments is directly embedded into your website. This helps with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and ensures that his site ranks high in Google.

Design

Krishna wanted a clean site with lots of white space, large banner images and a limited colour palette shown below.

Typography: We opted to use Open Sans, a clean and modern sans-serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson and commissioned by Google. It was specially designed to be legible in web, mobile and print.

I took great care to customise his Social Media Feed and News channel to match his brand.

Develop

We opted to use WordPress rather than plain HTML to make it easy for Krishna to update the pages himself.

I used my favourite WordPress starter theme and used minimal plugins and latest tech standards to ensure that the WordPress site loads fast.

Having tested several plugins, we used the wonderful Custom Facebook Feed Pro to seamlessly integrate Facebook content onto his website.

Implementation

Training (lack-of)

I helped publish the content and any updates to his key activities page and campaigns whilst his Facebook Feed has been dynamically populating his News/Blog.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

As part of the theme development, I included the right tags to ensure that search engines like Google had no difficulty in ranking the site. The addition of good content and good SEO plugin like Yoast ensures that the site ranks well in search engines. Since the Facebook content has been embedded on the site and gets frequently updated, it enables his posts to rank well in search engines.

Subscriptions and newsletters

Whilst a blog is good avenue to share news and thoughts, you would need an avenue to connect with users/customers at a personal level. Mailchimp is a great option for email marketing and outreach. We connected his Mailchimp account to allow for subscriptions from his website. It would be a great option when seeking support or volunteers.

The launch

Since the needs were very clear we were able to go live very quickly and launch a site so that Krishna could reach his community.

Feedback – feedback from Krishna, his community volunteers and his users was used to improve the site.