u3a SiteWorks

u3a SiteWorks is a website offering to u3as, Networks and Regions. A team of volunteers manage a Trust hosted website for content editors (we call them Web Managers) to maintain. The team also provides support and the documentation found on this site.

SiteWorks is based on the industry standard WordPress product and replaced the Site Builder offering in 2024 when nearly 700 SiteWorks sites went live.

Also see ‘What does SiteWorks provide to u3as?’

The volunteer project team have produced a SiteWorks/WordPress theme which makes it easy for u3as to create a website that follows the branding set out in the u3a brand guidelines.  The theme has an open-source licence which makes it available to anyone anywhere to use or modify.

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

Under the Web Managers menu Foundation study documents are available for site administration, general content editing. There is also a guide specifically for managing Groups.

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.

The SiteWorks team of volunteers also run a Zoom drop-in session twice a month aimed at those new to SiteWorks. These often start with a look at one specific topic. Details are emailed to Web Managers registered with us.

Site Builder was replaced by SiteWorks in 2024. Beacon and Site Builder had separate functions and the focus on the SiteWorks design was to implement the features of Site Builder as closely as possible. u3as will need to continue to maintain some groups related information in both Beacon and SiteWorks.

The Trust is running a Digital Services to u3as project (DSU) that at some stage will deliver a way forward in this area.

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

If you want to know more or have questions to help you decide then contact us using the button on the Start here page (menu above).

The next step will be to register with us – there is a link to the form to do this on the same home page (menu Start here). We then send instructions on how your Committee (Chair/Secretary) can sign the Trust’s SiteWorks Terms and Conditions (available in this FAQ section).

Once signed, we allocate a volunteer Supporter 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 you are currently using Beacon then some information could be exported from Beacon and, with some manipulation, imported into your SiteWorks site – specifically Group and Group Leader data and venues. If you have equivalent information on spreadsheets that could also be suitable.

Also see the FAQ Can I try out SiteWorks?.

Any Region/Network officially recognised (affiliated) to the Trust will be able to use SiteWorks hosting.

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

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, security warnings etc.)
• Provision of new ‘Starter Sites’ and assistance moving SiteWorks sites (hosted elsewhere) 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
• Twice monthly drop-in Zoom sessions aimed at new website users
• 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.

The charging year starts on 1st April 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 (27.2.25)
If you have specific questions on the content then contact the Trust by emailing tcenquiry@siteworks.u3a.org.uk

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

An Officer (usually the Business Secretary or Chair) 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 usually 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 new SiteWorks site includes a template you can edit and publish.

Some u3as ask why a Terms of Use is necessary if their site just presents information and does not retain personal data. It is worth noting they also cover Intellectual property right to your content and warnings about 3rd party links..

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. Note that this is not the case with many plugins, some functions are charged for, rather like Apps for your smartphone.

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 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 WordPress sites to be run privately on your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux). Local WP is a key tool for the training.

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 could potentially 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.

We occasionally publish a list of 3rd party plugins popular with SiteWorks installations in our Newsletters (menu News > Monthly Newsletters), search the page for ‘Plugins’.

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.

SiteWorks comes with a WordPress “theme”. This includes page layouts and the preferred colour palette and fonts as set out in the Trust’s Brand Guidelines.

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 without revealing the email of the recipient.
• Notices – are a way of alerting site visitors. 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. An image slider block will scroll through a number of pictures timed by a configurable interval.

WordPress does allow individual pages to be protected by a 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.

Also bear in mind that the password is going to have to be shared with others so personal data should not be stored and protected in this way.

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

u3as can make their own hosting arrangements. See Can the SiteWorks team help if our WordPress site is hosted on our own site? and Can I use the SiteWorks theme and plugins on our existing WordPress website?

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

A site’s Web Manager can 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 the equivalent is frequently done to copy a site to Local WP on personal computers. In this case download the backup and delete it immediately or configure plugins to make off-site backups, i.e. to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox or similar. These backups take up as much storage as the site itself and storing them on your server 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 sites hosted on the Sarah Hayes server are protected by:

• Corero DDoS Protection  (denial of service protection)
• Imunify360 (anti-virus protection)

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 Trust hosted 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 Procedures

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 references your current site, then it will need updating through your ISP/registrar to redirect to your SiteWorks site when it goes live.

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 with a more complex interface.
Do note that you cannot redirect to your SiteWorks site (which is a subdomain of u3asite.uk) using DNS records because all the SiteWorks sites share the same IP address 185.139.7.11. Locating the SiteWorks servers that host an individual SiteWorks site is done internally in the private sub-net for the IP address.

See also the FAQ New sites > What happens to links from your previous site?

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. This is standard practice and provides server resilience. Note that a SiteWorks site is independently backed up and individual sites can be restored. This is more granular than Beacon for example.

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.

Yes, on a best efforts basis. 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.

If you install 3rd party plugins it is possible 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 streaming services. SiteWorks videos are hosted on streamable.com. Note that steaming services provide a much smoother viewing experience that webserver hosting.

There are notes on embedding videos under menu Web Manager > ‘How.’how tos’ in depth.

Backups of each site are made each night. Making additional backups that are stored on the server, including those created for use by Local WP, also contravenes the Operational Procedures.

Note that when images are uploaded to your SiteWorks site they are resized under the scenes to various sizes appropriate for viewing of your web pages – rendering on smartphones for example.

Partially. Emails can be sent from within SiteWorks by utilising a standard form that generate emails to contacts specified on your site. The implementation is simple so, for example, it won’t be possible to see the delivery status of sent emails. A log of emails sent can be enabled – be aware this logs personal data so needs to be covered by your site’s Terms of Use.

SiteWorks sites use a subdomain of the domain “u3asite.uk”. So, if your u3a is called Anytown then you will probably have the subdomain “anytown” and your site’s URL will be anytown.u3asite.uk.

Many u3as like to setup generic email addresses configured for post holders and subject areas such as chair@ secretary@ webmaster@ etc. This means the email address goes with the role rather than the current post holder’s personal email. This cannot be done with siteworks subdomains (technical bit, all SiteWorks site share an IP address).

A popular approach to get role based email addresses is to apply for a Google Worspace charity account. Another option is to purchase a domain name e.g. anytownu3a.org.uk (.org.uk domains are inexpensive). A number of providers will offer Charities free or low cost email addresses to use with your domain – ask an AI tool for a list.

This applies if you have a website being replaced by SiteWorks.

When a website is replaced by a live SiteWorks site then visitors will still arrive at the site being replaced through links from other sites or their browser bookmarks. The usual approach to address this is to organise redirection of traffic to the new SiteWorks site.

We recommend contacting sites that have links to your old site advising them to update them to reference your SiteWorks site. See below for how to set about this.

Once your SiteWorks site is live, the first step is to edit the site being replaced to explain that you have a new site and provide a link.

Next, if possible, setup a redirect to automatically land visitors on your SiteWorks site if they navigate directly to your now old site. This is covered next.

Technical Notes

The approach to redirection will depend on whether or not you have registered a domain name. For example anytownu3a.org.uk

If you have a domain name then through your domain registrar (usually the hosting company of your site being replaced) organise a redirect. Technically this is a 301 “moved permanently” status. This will automatically take visitors to your SiteWorks site. It will also mean that any web crawlers indexing your site should immediately stop using the now old URL and browsers should forget the old address. How this is setup will depend on the company (ISP) hosting the site. Often it’s a simple case of typing the SiteWorks URL in a box.

If you don’t have a domain registered then an automated redirect may still be possible through your hosting company. Otherwise your can rely on the old site having a notice to say your site has moved and provide a link.

Note that a domain cannot ‘point’ it directly at a SiteWorks hosted account using DNS records. The is because SiteWorks uses subdomains (as in ‘handf’ in https://handf.u3asite.uk) and they all share the same IP address.

3rd party links to your site

You can use your preferred search engine to locate the links to the site being replaced. Go to the home page of the search engine (google.com, bing.com etc.) and type in the body of the URL i.e. omit the ‘https://’. Don’t do this in the address bar of your browser as this will likely land you on the site. Just typing in your u3a name will include other references and muddy your results. An example to search for could be handfu3a.org.uk.

The search results will list sites with link(s). You will need to skip results that originate from within the 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 settings 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.

When a SiteWorks site is created your u3a is asked for a subdomain name of your choice. If your u3a is Anytown u3a then for SiteWorks it will most likely be anytown.u3asite.uk. The name cannot be changed. The prefix www is optional but no longer useful. Like all secure sites the prefix is https:// i.e. https://anytown.u3asite.uk

There is not automate means to move 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. If data such as Groups and Venues is available as a spreadsheet then SiteWorks has an Import facility. This would be idea for data exported from Beacon or similar membership systems or just 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 found in the menu Web Manager > ‘how tos’ in depth look for ‘Local WP’ articles.

A Web Manager is responsible for the administration of a SiteWorks site. This is a much broader role than just maintaining content. There is a suggested role description under New to SiteWorks > Roles and functions

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 menu 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.