Website design for Purley Masjid
The Purley Masjid website was over 7 years old and was hosted on WIX. It was maintained by a number of volunteers during this period which meant that the site became fragmented over time with an inconsistent look and feel across the various pages.
The brief for this project was to develop a clean looking website that had the following key features
Easy to maintain prayer timetable - the mosque follows the sunnah of the moon sighting so the 1st of the Islamic month changes which requires the calendar to be adjusted
An events calendar page that can be maintained by volunteers with little to no IT skills
A fully-fledged e-commerce platform for one-click donations
With the above requirements, Squarespace was the obvious choice as the preferred platform.
Starting from the e-commerce requirements, Squarespace has an e-commerce store management component with integration to Stripe and PayPal for payment processing. The inventory management is very intuitive and I was able to train a couple of members of the management team very quickly. Overall this part took less than a few hours to have up and running. An item was put on sale before the website launch as a trial and the management team was extremely impressed in particular the ease with which each purchase could be tagged with Gift-Aid data collection, something that was a huge operational burden in the past.
Squarespace also has a calendar function that allows the mosque to create a series of events in an easy to use interface. Once the events are created, they are automatically displayed on the home page and at the same time the user is presented with a link to save the event to their personal calendars such as Google calendar.
For the prayer timetable, we integrated our prayer time widget which connects to Google Sheets via Google APIs. As long as the user possesses spreadsheet skills, that is all it takes to ensure the prayer time is maintained and displayed accurately on the website.
Overall we thoroughly enjoyed working with the Purley Masjid team. The whole website conversion took 5 days from end to end.