Welcome to the 2024 edition of the Aughton & Ormskirk u3a website!
The first thing you might notice is the web address - aou3a.u3asite.uk. This uses our new subdomain name, aou3a, with the standard domain name, u3asite.uk, adopted by the National u3a.
The new website uses a theme (u3a SiteWorks) developed by the National u3a SiteWorks Development Project. This theme allows us to display more prominently what's going on in our u3a, and has the added benefit of being very easy to use.
We have tried to bring over from the 'old' site as much of the Groups information as possible, though we have not kept all the old and rarely accessed material.
A new feature, courtesy of the SiteWorks theme, is the ability to sort the long list of Groups in different ways - alphabetically, by activity category, by day of week or by venue. This was difficult to do with the old system, but is built into the new one.
One feature of the new theme that looks to be extremely useful is Events.
This particularly applies to our u3a-wide events such as the AGM or the summer Barn Dance. But it would also be useful for any group that has, say, monthly meetings on topics open to the membership in general, such as the Film Appreciation group.
A major difference from the old system, for very sound reasons, is how we display information about leaders and committee members. The recommended default is NOT to show telephone numbers, but to use an email contact form for members to get in touch. The contact form hides real email addresses, so that web bots can't harvest people's email addresses.
If a leader insists on displaying a telephone number on their group page, a mobile number would be more secure than a landline.