This is a post about how I made the site for the West Somerset Food Cupboard.
West Somerset Food Cupboard provides:
Emergency food for people in crisis
A Local pantry membership scheme helping people experiencing food insecurity to access affordable supermarket surplus food
Food support for partner agencies and projects
Information on how to access local support for a range of issues
from https://www.wsfoodcupboard.org.uk/
The West Somerset Food Cupboard (WSFC) has been providing emergency food for people in the West Somerset area (where I live) since 2007. Their previous web presence had consisted of a Facebook Page as well as having their monthly newsletters added on a couple of local community sites.
In early 2022, the WSFC was looking to become a fully registered charity (which is now is); they were also expanding the services they provide to include a local Food Pantry (for perishable foods from supermarkets, etc.).
I know some of the team at the food cupboard, so I asked if they’d like a site – and they said yes!!!
They wanted the site to be very clear and simple for people to use. For those seeking food support, people wanting to donate food, money or their time and other community partners who want to know more about the food cupboard.
So hopefully that’s what the site does!
The site also has a news section with their monthly newsletter on it.
The site runs on WordPress (as does this site) and uses the GeneratePress theme (as does this site).
I LOVE GeneratePress it’s my goto theme as it’s very flexible in both design a function. The basic theme is free, but it’s ‘Premium’ add-on makes all the difference. You can check out GeneratePress here (this is an affiliate link, so if you purchase GP Premium using that link I get a little thank you…)
The WSFC logo featured a green, so I used that as the main accent colour on the site. I’ve used some CSS circle gradients for the footer and some feature banners. These came from the very nifty ‘Gradient Magic’ site.
Rather than using stock photos, I’ve used stock illustrations. They came from the amazing unDraw site where you can download some brilliant and customisable illustrations for free! You can set a custom accent colour the site, and then download SVG versions of the illustrations, which enables you to easily customise them even more! This allowed to colour theme the figures in the illustrations and combine them as well, to make variations – brilliant.
There’s a map on the site showing the food collections points for the cupboard. This was made using the MapPress plugin. It’s a very handy plugin for making maps with makers/pointers on it.
As well as the website, I also helped the WSFC with a better system for their email newsletter. They’d been sending their newsletter out by a ‘normal’ email account. This was going out to quite a few people and getting towards the level where it can get ‘spammy’ looking (even if you use ‘bcc’).
So I help the food cupboard switch over to using MailerLite. It’s a super easy to use email newsletter service, with a very good free level!
If you’d like to find out more about the West Somerset Food Cupboard and what they do, please visit their site…