Why a new website?

The short answer: it was coming to the end of its life.

The longer, more technical answer: our former website was built in ‘CMS made Simple’ which is written in the PHP programming language. Upgrades to PHP would at some point in 2024 break the website. This in fact happened in early 2023; after an upgrade to PHP the site was broken until we persuaded its hosts to roll back the version of PHP to one that would allow the website to work. But this was only a temporary fix, as the hosts will only tolerate old versions of PHP as long as their security is supported.

We were also paying for considerably more functionality than we needed, and the University Alumni Office is encouraging member associations to adopt a common look and feel, using the WordPress template installed here.