About – RILEYUK

Why create a website?

This was the question I asked myself when I first started to be interested in web-design and creating a ‘web-presence’. This process started way back in the Year 2000, during my first stint at university as a Part 1 student at Manchester University’s School of Architecture. Curiosity is the answer but it developed quickly into a method of keeping in touch with people (via the Forum) before the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the whole slew of social media available to us today. It has eventually ended up as a record of my professional and personal life and has been very rewarding.

Our history

The site started as a project called melshimber.org.uk and was never published (until now). The first published version of this site was uploaded to a domain www.michaelriley.org.uk (now lapsed) and was laboriously created using HTML code and Adobe ‘Dreamweaver’. Following this first publication there have been four major versions of the site to-date and several different domains, thankfully Versions 3 and 4 were created with a programme called iWeb which was developed by Apple; A very versatile programme, it has helped amateur web site owners for a long time before being culled in 2011. I have continued with an old version of iWeb for many years but now felt the need to update this site using modern ‘responsive’ technologies. This is mainly to deal with mobile computing and give me the ability to update the site on the move. And so, Version 5 was born.

Version 5, which has been dubbed V5 – The Great CMS Experiment, is powered by WordPress, Pinnacle Theme by Kadence Themes and is hosted on 1and1. This final choice of Content Management Software (CMS) software has been a while in the making and testing, I also tested Concrete 5, Joomla and Drupal. I also considered using Square Space based on their slick website and recommendations by ‘Hellen and Ollie’ from the Answer Me This podcast. Square Space would have been a good choice if I wasn’t also hosting a number of sites on my webhosting service.

Current projects

Although the website has now been launched I have only uploaded a small selection of the projects and events which were shown on Version 4, content will be restored in the coming months.

I also have a number of other web-projects as follows,

John Riley Photography – Created using WordPress, forum by phpBB3.
Atherton and District Amateur Photographic Society – Ran for c. 15 years, current website by others.
Amelia Riley – Created using WordPress.
Georgia Riley – Created using WordPress.