The Latvian umbrella organisation in South Australia is a non profit has the acronym DLOA, and has never had a web presence. The secretary of DLOA approached me to try and solve a number of problems:

• to communicate information about the organisation
• to display the calendar of events
• to serve as a directory of member organisations

This website presented a number of new challenges. Firstly it was needed entirely in Latvian, so issues such as fonts and plugin translations needed to be solved. The member directory was previously just an excel spreadsheet but to ease the burden of keeping it current, a method whereby each organisation can update their own details. Lastly, there needed to be something to keep the site fresh as with so much reference information the site is at risk of stagnating.

A WooThemes premium theme was selected for the WordPress content management platform. A number of plugins were found, including one that worked perfectly for the membership directory. The translation from English to Latvian went well, with translation features baked right into WordPress.

To keep the content fresh, with permission from the content provider a local news feed was created, taking news stories from the Latvian national online newspaper and filtering for Adelaide. This took a fair bit of tweaking to get just right but now works very well.

See the results at www.dloa.org.au.