u3a SiteWorks is a website offering to u3as, Networks and Regions. A team of volunteers provide a Trust hosted and managed website for site owners (Web Managers) to maintain. The team also provides support and the documentation on this site.

SiteWorks is based on the industry standard WordPress product and replaced the Site Builder offering in 2024. When migration from Site Builder was completed there were nearly 700 sites.

Also see What does SiteWorks provide to u3as?

The project team have produced a SiteWorks/WordPress theme which makes it easy for u3as to produce a website that follows the recommendations for use of colour and font set out in the u3a brand guidelines.  The theme is developed under an open-source licence which makes it available to anyone to use or modify.

1. The project team have developed several WordPress features that provide custom functionality called “plugins” to provide a way of managing u3a groups, venues, contacts and events.  The plugins are developed under an open-source licence which makes them available to anyone to use or modify.
   
2. SiteWorks provides a hosting service to all u3as giving access to a SiteWorks/WordPress website.
   
3. Support is provided through a Help Desk ticketing system using the same tool as Beacon and the Trust.
   
4. Foundation guides are available that cover administration for Web Managers and editing content for other users such as Group Leaders.

The drop-down menu Web Managers includes a page Learn WordPress with some recommended web links to general WordPress training. It is recognised that these are not an introduction and quite technical in places. There is also an early video specifically on SiteWorks.

In the New Year two Foundation study documents will be released – one for content editing and one for site administrators.

Beacon and Site Builder have separate functions. The focus on the SiteWorks project is to migrate SiteBuilder sites to WordPress with the features available matching SiteBuilder as closely as possible and to enable automated content migration. u3as will need to continue to maintain some groups related information in Beacon and some in SiteWorks, just as they currently do with Site Builder. 

A small team of volunteers has been formed to start a project to integrate Beacon and SiteWorks.

All u3as are equally welcome to adopt SiteWorks and take up the Website hosting offering.

The first step is to register with us – there is a link to the form to do this on the home page (menu Start here). On the form select the  ‘First registration for my u3a’ option for the final question 7. You will be contacted inviting your Committee to sign the Trust’s SiteWorks Terms and Conditions.

We have a team of volunteer SiteWorks Supporters and one of them will be allocated to advise and organise the practicalities. We offer a ‘Starter site’, which is essentially an empty site with an example of a Group, an Event, Contacts etc. If you have an exiting website there is no automated migration but much of the content can be copied and pasted.

If your existing site uses the SiteWorks theme and plugins then we are looking to develop a documented migration process.

If you are currently using Beacon then some information could be exported from Beacon and imported into your SiteWorks site e.g. Group and Group Leader data. If you are using a different management system or have information on spreadsheets, you may be able to import that after some spreadsheet manipulation.

Additional information that you might find useful can be found by using the menu Web Manager > Install Local WP and Demo site.

Any website officially recognised by the Trust will be able to use SiteWorks hosting. As long as a Web Manager is available they can avail themselves to the same service as u3as migrating from Site Builder or adopt the ‘Starter Site’ option.

Note that there are separate Terms and Conditions for Networks and Regions. Who can sign these depends on the governance status.

Subject Advisor sites are essentially treated as Networks.

Key functions and services of the SiteWorks team include:

• The Help Desk support ticketing service
• User Guides, ‘How tos’ and related articles, new Web Manager and author foundation guides
• Operational management of live sites (backups, restores, update maintenance)
• Provision of new ‘Starter Sites’ and assistance moving SiteWorks sites to the Trust’s hosting
• Change Management – new features including WordPress releases
• Keeping records – administration of Web Manager contacts
• Communications – operational updates, newsletters, promoting SiteWorks
• Contributing to the Beacon/SiteWorks integration project
• Governance and interfacing with the Trust.

The Terms & Conditions state:

The fee for the SiteWorks Service is £50 (including VAT) per annum, invoiced annually in advance. No refund will be payable for unused portions of the year, if applicable.

Charging starts on 1st April 2025 when invoices will be sent out.

These are the SiteWorks hosting Terms & Conditions for u3as. They cover the whole of the UK. Terms & Conditions for u3as

For affiliated Networks, Regions, Subject Adviser and Subject Network sites applicable Terms & Conditions will be send directly.

An Officer (usually the Business Secretary) registered with the Trust needs to sign the T&Cs.

To be GDPR and PECR (UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) compliant your website will need a ‘terms of use’ notice. For convenience these are available as a template you can edit (to add your u3a name etc.) and need to be linked from the footer of all Trust hosted sites.

This link is to a PDF version Website terms of use. Your SiteWorks site includes a template you can edit and publish.

WordPress software is a very popular choice for website creators, it is estimated to be used by at least 40% of website designers worldwide. WordPress is straightforward, flexible and scalable, with the potential to adopt additional ‘plugins’ for added functionality going forward.

It is an open-source set of programs so does not involve dealing with a supplier and the associated licensing and software support costs.

Yes – the latest pre-release version of SiteWorks is available to try out. Information on how to download and install it are on this site under Web Manager > New Web Managers > Install Local WP and Demo site. For more support visit the u3a WordPress forum (you may need to register) in section ‘Discussions about SiteWorks’. This link should work if you are registered and take you to the post Try out the SiteWorks theme and plugins. There is also a section ‘Questions about SiteWorks’.

‘Local WP’ enables a single user to run a WordPress site on their computer (Windows, Mac, Linux). Local WP is a key tool for the training and migration from Site Builder.

The u3a theme, u3a plugins and selected third party plugins are supplied on installation and supported by the SiteWorks team.

u3as can install other plugins at their own risk but some may conflict with SiteWorks plugins. u3as raising support issues may be asked to disable additional plugins and confirm their issue is still present. If you do install 3rd party plugins then do due diligence – how many installations are there, what is user feedback like and how often is it updated and maintained? Ask on the u3a WP forum. Also try the plugin out on Local WP first and not your live site.

Moving forward, it is possible that the SiteWorks team will test the compatibility of plugins to meet functionality requested by the u3a community. This could lead to a list of plugins that would be supported to some degree on a best endeavours basis.

Also see below Can I use the SiteWorks theme and plugins on our existing WordPress website? and Can the SiteWorks team help if our WordPress site is hosted on our own site?

SiteWorks is WordPress with a number of u3a specific features bundled in. This includes, as much as possible, equivalent SiteBuilder functions.

SiteWorks comes with a WordPress “theme” that defines a preferred colour palette and fonts as set out in the Trust’s Brand Guidelines. There are also some settings for page content spacing.

u3a specific functionality is provided by a number of WordPress plugins developed by the SiteWorks Team. These are:

• Events – typically these will be monthly meetings open to all or outings such as coach trips
• Groups – these help manage and publicise interest groups
• Venues – details such as address and accessibility of venues used by your u3a
• Contacts – entries for members who will usually be Committee members or Group coordinators/conveners. Enables contact forms to be setup that generate emails behind the scenes
• Notices – are a way of alerting readers. Their special feature is each notice has a date range to control when it will be visible.
• u3a Import/Export enables u3a plugin data (events, groups, venues, contacts) to be loaded or exported in basic spreadsheet format (CSV file).

SiteWorks is also configured with a selection of useful generally available plugins. For example a “lightbox” enables images to be displayed as a pop-up overlay on a page. A slider block will scroll through a number of images given a set interval.

SiteWorks replaced the Site Builder website offering in 2024. Where technically practical the Site Builder functionality was replicated.

Page layouts can be much richer than Site Builder with features such as image galleries and multi-column layouts. WordPress also automatically renders pages in a readable format on smartphones and smaller tablets.

Site Builder allowed one or more uploaded files to be protected with a combination of a single shared username and password.

WordPress does allow individual pages to be protected by a single shared password. However, this only protects access to the text on that page and any media (typically images and documents) referenced by the page are not protected and are publicly accessible. This means a PDF document cannot be fully protected.

Third Age Trust (TAT) has a SiteWorks hosting arrangement in place with a company called Sarah Hayes. They already supply services to the Trust including looking after the main Trust website u3a.org.uk

Of course, u3as can make their own hosting arrangements but otherwise be part of the Site Builder to SiteWorks migration. See f Can the SiteWorks team help if our WordPress site is hosted on our own site? and g Can I use the SiteWorks theme and plugins on our existing WordPress website?

Every individual SiteWorks site and account will be fully and automatically backed up on a daily overnight basis. At least two weeks worth of backups will be retained. There will be two copies of each backup, one on your SiteWorks server storage and one off-site in the UK.

A site’s Web Manager will be able to request a restore of their site through the Help Desk.

The  backup processes perform so called incremental backups that only capture site changes from the previous day and are far less demanding of disk space than full backups. The restore capability is fast, tested and proven.

There should be no need for sites to make additional backups, but if this is done the plugins must be configured to make off-site backups, i.e. to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox or similar. Full backups take up as much storage as the site itself and storing other backups on the SiteWorks hosting service is in contravention of the SiteWorks Operational Procedures.

The team and the SiteWorks hosting company Sarah Hayes have taken a number of steps to protect SiteWorks sites.

All the sites hosted on the Sarah Hayes server are protected by:

• ConfigServer Security and Firewall
• Corero DDoS Protection  (denial of service protection)
• Imunify360 (anti-virus protection)

Following discussions with Sarah Hayes we include the Loginizer plugin on all sites to prevent brute force username/password attacks. The SiteWorks configuration plugin enforces strong user passwords.

The Sysadmin team are proactively ensuring that all sites are running the latest versions of all WordPress and related system software.

The SiteWorks plugins have been independently assessed for potential security risks.

The team also monitors the installation of 3rd party plugins on sites. It is important to note that this does not take away the responsibility of Web Managers to make their own security assessment of additional plugins. For more information see Web Manager > Operational Proecedures

A domain name is essentially the main element of a web address, for example u3a.org.uk. Some u3as will have registered a domain name of their choice, for example Hammersmith and Fulham have registered handfu3a.org.uk. Along with your domain name your u3a may be subscribed to hosting and email services.

Check that your u3a has access to the management facilities of your domain. This will be with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or domain name registrar. It is not unusual to have your domain set-up by a member who has moved on without making transfer arrangements.

If you are migrating to SiteWorks and your domain points to, or redirects to, your Site Builder site then it will need updating through your ISP/registrar to point to your SiteWorks site when it goes live. If you don’t do this then redirection should still happen, but it will be through a redirection chain – first to Site Builder and then to SiteWorks. This chain will be broken after 3 months when your Site Builder is withdrawn, so plan to do this when you migrate.

Technical bit – each ISP has their own interface for managing your domain name. Many will simply enable you to type your SiteWorks URL into a ‘redirect’ box. Others will offer more facilities that so along with a more complex interface.
Do note that you cannot redirect to your SiteWorks site (which is a subdomain of u3asite.uk) using an IP address because all the SiteWorks sites share the same IP address 185.139.7.11. Locating the servers that hosts an individual SiteWorks site is done internally by the Web servers for the IP address.

Each u3a will have its own instance of WordPress and associated database. This includes the core WordPress code, plugins and theme. This means that whatever is changed on your site, such as updating a plugin, will not affect other u3as.

The cloud hosting environment – computers and operating system – will be shared as they are now with Site Builder. The key difference is that Site Builder has one database and one suite of application programs shared by all the Site Builder sites. One benefit will be that a SiteWorks site will be independently backed up and individual sites can restored.

To learn more, do an Internet search for VPS (Virtual Private Server) or read this Wikipedia technical article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server.

Of course.  Any services provided by the Trust are available to all u3as.  However, the assistance would be limited to the use of the theme and plugins developed for, or selected for use with, the SiteWorks WordPress implementation.  It will be unlikely that the SiteWorks team will be able to help with issues such as hosting or email.

For issues outside this scope, the u3a WordPress Development Forum (you may need to register) provides access to more expertise and a SOS service. 

Yes – the theme and plugins have been developed under an open-source licence so they are available for anyone to use or modify without charge or restriction.  The theme is a ‘Block Theme’ and so may not support all the features of your website if it currently uses a ‘Classic Theme’. 

If you already have plugins installed it is possible that the u3a plugins may conflict with their operation.  You should always test before installing them on a live website and ensure you have adequate backups to restore the site should any problems arise.

Our hosting arrangement is essentially based on fair usage of resources across all our sites. As video files take up orders of magnitude more storage space than images and other WordPress media, video file uploads will not be allowed.

Videos can be hosted on YouTube or other cloud services. There is a WordPress Embed block for YouTube used on the User Guide page of this site.

Note that backups of each site are made each night. Making additional backups that are stored on the server also contravenes the Operational Procedures.

Not that when images are uploaded to your SiteWorks site they are resized to an appropriate size for web pages.

Partially. Emails can be sent from within SiteWorks by creating forms that generate emails to contacts created on your site. The initial implementation is likely to be simple so, for example, it won’t be possible to see the delivery status of sent emails.

Having a subdomain also means you could potentially subscribe to an email service from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and use your subdomain for email addresses through that ISP. This would mean generic mailboxes could be configured for post holders and subject areas like chair@ secretary@ webmaster@ etc.
To be able to do this will require your u3asite.uk subdomain to be configured to allow this and there is no commitment currently to provide this service.

When a Site Builder site is replaced by a live SiteWorks site then the Site Builder site will become inaccessible on the Internet. There will be visitors who will still arrive at the old Site Builder site through links from other sites or their browser bookmarks. The SiteWorks technical team will invoke a process for these visitors that automatically changes the URL in the browser to a SiteWorks one.

How this redirection will work depends on whether the SiteWorks site started out as a ‘Migrated’ site created from extracted Site Builder data, or as an empty ‘Starter Site’.

Migrated site – visitors should be redirected to the equivalent page on your new site. Note that this relies on the WordPress name of the equivalent page not being changed by the Web Manager following migration (see Technical notes below). If the mapping cannot be resolved then the visitor will land on the SiteWorks ‘404’ page.
Site Builder admins can now see how this will work. From the ‘ADMIN MENU’ select ‘MIGRATION’ and read the ‘Help’ page.

Starter Site – visitors to the Site Builder home page should be redirected to the home page on your new site. For other Site Builder pages (such as a Groups page) then the visitor will land on the SiteWorks ‘404’ page.

In either case, the Web Manager should customise the default SiteWorks ‘404’ page giving instructions to the redirected visitor. This page lives in a special place, on the Dashboard select Appearance > Editor > Templates > Page 404.

Important – when the SiteWorks site is made publicly visible the administrator of the Site Builder site will need to contact Site Builder support and request redirection. Failure to do so will mean search engines will index both sites.
If the SiteWorks site needs to be withdrawn for some reason the Site Builder redirection can be switched off.

This redirection service will be retained for 3 months following the withdrawal of the Site Builder service. After that time the site will be backed up and removed. An earlier removal date can be requested.

We recommend contacting sites that have links to your Site Builder site advising them to update them to SiteWorks links. See below for on how to address this.

Some Technical Notes

The forwarder from Site Builder will use a 301 “moved permanently” status. This should mean that any web crawlers should immediately stop using the old URL and any browser should forget offering the old address.

If you have a “Migrated” site, the redirection will use the page name from your Site Builder page and redirect to the equivalent page in your SiteWorks website. So, for example, if you had a group page on your Site Builder site titled “Walking – Short Walks” this will be redirected to a page on your SiteWorks website which has the page slug of “walking-short-walks”. The page slug is generated during the migration process, so even if you subsequently change the title of the page in your SiteWorks website to something different such as “Walking – Easy Walks” then as long as you do not alter the page slug, the redirection will continue to work.

If you remove a page from your SiteWorks website that was a target for redirection from a former Site Builder page, the visitor using the old URL will instead be redirected to the SiteWorks ‘404’ page. By default this shows a message explaining that the page could not be found and suggesting the visitor uses the menu or search box to find what they were looking for. You can customise this page by editing the Page 404 page template (see above).

The Site Builder redirection service will ensure 3^rd party links to your Site Builder site will automatically reach your new SiteWorks site. However, this is only a means to give you time to address important links to your site as after 2 months the redirection service will be switched off. You will need to identify these links so you can contact the site owners to update them.

3rd party links to your site

Even if you have your own domain registered there could be some links that use the u3asites.org.uk/u3asitename reference – perhaps they pre-date your domain.

You can use your preferred search engine to locate the links to your Site Builder site. Go to the home page of the search engine (google.com, bing.com etc.) and type in the body of your Site Builder URL. For example u3asites.org.uk/hammersmith-fulham – do not do this in the address bar of your browser as this will simply land you on your Site Builder site and, if setup, re-direct you to SiteWorks. Don’t just type in your u3a name as this will include SiteWorks hits and muddy your results.

The search results will list sites with link(s). You will need to skip results that originate from within your Site Builder site. Check each result and decide how important it is to contact them with a request to update their link.

Some specific sites to check:

• If you use Beacon then update the System setting’s u3a Home page and other references to Site Builder (this won’t be picked up by the search)
• Notify your Network u3a and/or Regional u3a site admins
• If you are registered with the Charity Commission their contact information needs updating
• Check local community organisations, councils etc. although these should show up in your search results.

To give an example, assume your u3a is called Blueberry and browsers use the link (URL) u3asites.org.uk/blueberry to access Site Builder today. On SiteWorks it will be blueberry.u3asite.uk (both links without the https:// and optional www.). The name you choose can be different to that on Site Builder, you will be asked to decide at the site of the creation of your SiteWorks site but after that it cannot be changed so give it some thought.

This setup is different from Site Builder in that the site will be what is known as a subdomain on the Internet. A subdomain name helps with search engine indexing and will highlight your u3a or site name at the start of the URL rather than the end behind a ‘/’.

There are currently no supported ways to automate moving a website to SiteWorks on the Trust’s hosting service. The most reliable method is largely manual working with an empty “Starter Site”. Content can be copied and pasted into individual SiteWorks pages but will require a degree of tidying up. The Import facility will be a time saver if data such as Groups and Venues is available as a spreadsheet, for example exported from Beacon or similar membership system or spreadsheets.

Where the source site is already a SiteWorks site (theme and plugins) there are still some technical challenges:

• The SiteWorks production build includes various plugins such as the MainWP management plugin that needs configuring by the SiteWorks System admin team.  The management plugin also relies on the existence of a ‘SwDevAdmin’ WordPress user with a unique password per site known only to the system admin team.
  
• Email can only be sent successfully from a SiteWorks hosted site if the relevant definitions are set up in the main WordPress configuration file. Some WordPress migration tools will overwrite this file.
  
• Some WordPress migration plugins assume the web manager has access to the file system or to the database server to directly upload or manipulate files,  This is not available with SiteWorks hosting.

An experienced WordPress administrator who understands these issues could request a “Starter” site which has all the above setup done correctly and then use a plugin such as WPVivid. The team could then check that the necessary settings are still intact and correct if necessary.
The u3a WordPress developers forum https://u3awpdev.org.uk (requires registration) can offer advice. There is also an article on moving a site in the Web Manager > ‘How to’ articles.

A Web Manager is responsible for the administration of a SiteWorks site. This is a much broader role than just maintaining content.
Your Web Manager and their assistants will be responsible for:

• setting up user accounts for u3a members who need to be
  able to log in to the website to maintain the website content
  
  
• making such changes to the website that can only be made by an
  administrator including changes to the website main menu and overall
  appearance
  
  
• installing and configuring any additional plugins chosen to meet the needs of
  the site
  
  
• ensuring that all content complies with copyright legislation
  
  
• ensuring compliance with the provisions of the GDPR

If your issue cannot be resolved by referring to our Web Manager > User Guide and other articles under the Web Manager menu, you can raise a support ticket with our Help Desk team using the form linked to the User Guide or Start here page of this site.

For more general advise, for example the pros and cons of various designs, then use the u3a WordPress development forum https://u3awpdev.org.uk (you will need to register).

The Help Desk ticketing system is provided by the Zendesk product that is also used by the Trust and the Beacon support team. Note these run as independent systems so a Beacon ticket, for example, isn’t visible to the SiteWorks team or by the Trust.