The Friends of Heene Cemetery are proud to announce the launch of their new website!
The previous (WordPress) version that launched in the autumn of 2020 was the group's first website, paid for by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to cover a heritage project entitled "Collect, Preserve and Share the History of Heene Cemetery Burials". By the time launch happened, that specification had broadened to include other aspects of the group's work, particularly that of documenting the cemetery's rich biodiversity.
Responding to the problem of scale
As that original site grew beyond its 1,960 burial records, and encompassed what is currently over 700 species records and over 65 blog posts, new requirements became apparent and a new website was needed.
Making this volume of data easily available to visitors is a subtle challenge. Search systems do the bulk of this, but there is so much more that can be done to make more of it visible (without searching).
Finding as well as searching
The site you're now looking at has introduced a 'sidebar' on the right-hand side of nearly every page (below every page on mobile displays) that lists information relevant to that page. This helps provide views onto similar content, encouraging you to dip in and explore. Chance encounters are positively encouraged.
You're seeing this in action on the blog part of the site:
and on the burials pages:
and on the species pages:
A similar use of this design shows up on a page discussing the cemetery's meadowland origins, which allows a linked display of plants that are typically found in meadows and have been recorded in the cemetery:
This design encourages visitors to dip in and explore related information, allowing them to do so with far fewer clicks than the old website managed. Although the search systems provided within the website are powerful, there's also something to be said for finding new material because thoughtful design satisfies curiosity.
Powerful search tools
The core search tools on the website are the burial data and the species data search pages. These are intuitive and flexible, needing no explanation. Give them a spin. Drop-downs selections are activated immediately, text-entry requires you to hit an 'Apply' button (or just use your keyboard's OK key).
Of special note in the species search system is the "Often requested group" drop-down. This helps bring together species that properly belong in different families. Trees, for example, are scattered across 15 different species families. This single drop-down reaches out beyond these scientific limitations to bring together results that non-scientists often want to see.
As if the above aren't enough, there's a separate Search page that allows users to find anything anywhere on the website.
Species sponsorship and dedications
We've introduced a new system whereby you can sponsor a species or dedicate one in the name of a loved one. The former can be done by different people for the same species, whereas a dedication is unique. With the latter, you can choose your own wording. You can see these on individual species pages as well as being gathered together on a single page. (For a modest £5 or £10 charge, this raises valuable funds for the group.)
Making better sense of burial and species data
We've created an extensible mechanism that enables us to map burial and species records against customizable criteria. Where possible, burials now have occupations and causes of death specified; separate pages provide charts that try to make sense of this complexity. This helped us, for example, see that infection was the greatest cause of death for those buried in Heene between 1873 and 1977. Species are mapped against scientific categories of vulnerability and threat. For example, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature upgraded the threat to hedgehogs from vulnerable to near-threatened. A single page draws together any species with such designations.
Publish once and announce it throughout
By adding taxonomies (as described above) and by giving content editors smart options for making their content available in different parts of the site, everyone's work flow has been streamlined. A simple example is a checkbox provided when a heritage researcher is working on a burial record:
To keep tabs on how many such images there are, a separate Faces from the past page brings them all together.
And there's more . . .
- a timeline of the cemetery's history;
- an inbuilt mapping system that can be used to display corners of Worthing where specific groups of people who are buried in Heene lived, and, within each burial record, where they were buried;
- a listing on the home page of various events, linked to an event page that gives more detail;
- a listing of species by their Latin name, essential for specialists;
- the ability to export burial and species data to Excel spreadsheets so that the various volunteers can share data;
- internal auditing tools that list researchers and the burial they are working on, species identifiers, and endowed graves - and much more;
- a Website Carbon badge at the foot of every page (which will be progressively updated in the weeks after launch) that reminds editors that some pages can be environmentally cleaner (or dirtier) than others;
- and, last but not least, there is Victoria Lamont's glorious illustration at the top of every page (except on the burials and species pages — because we want users on mobiles who are physically in the cemetery to get to the information with the minimum of scrolling).
Bringing all this in-house
We are lucky to have brought all of this work in-house, done by one of our volunteers who did this work professionally. It frees the group from a substantial annual expense.
Above all, the website aims to do a better job of showcasing the detail, complexity and magic of Worthing's Heene Cemetery.
Written by Rob Tomlinson