source: 4WardEverUK
published: 13 November 2022

In 2023 the 4WardEverUK website will be undergoing a significant downsize in relation to its content and frequency of output, whilst retaining crucial archived resources. We will also be switching to a new hosting platform.

We envisage that this work will be completed sometime between January and February 2023 with the helpful assistance of our key partners, Naphtali Associates and First Stop Web Design.

So what happens now?

The existing website will continue functioning as normal, however we may not publish as much new content to the resources, information and case profile sections. We’ll continue publishing news of interest but from January 2023 much of this may be via our social media networks.

So why the change?
There are a number of key influencers of this change which includes:

Human resources capacity
Over the years since the development of 4WardEverUK in 2006, we have focussed more of our time into the area of developing and collaborating with various parties to provide direct support services (e.g. The National Memorial Family Fund, Red Alert HELP, Catalyst 4 Change, The Mentoring & Advocacy Support Hub (M.A.S.H) and others. This was always part of a long-term plan.

Keeping existing resources updated
The 4WardEverUK website contains a vast array of resources and information. Ensuring that this all remains up-to-date and relevant takes an awful lot of time, and that time is increasingly difficult to find given our human resources capacity. Also, the availability of information on the web has progressed significantly since our launch, when this was not the case. We will however maintain the Red Alert HELP! DIY Portal and transfer relevant resources over from the 4WardEverUK website.

Website performance and maintenance!
We currently use the hosted WordPress platform for the 4WardEverUK website, and as good as this is, the platform also takes up a great deal of maintenance time. Once again, given our current human resources capacity and focus on direct service provision, it is increasingly a challenge managing these performance issues. We are switching to the Duda platform which has significantly improved performance and a much reduced maintenance load on our small team.

What’s going and what’s staying
In our Events/Resources section some content will not be migrated, this includes ‘Featured Events’, ‘Publications’ and ‘Statistics’. Similarly in the Links/Film section we won’t be migrating sub-sections such as the ‘Film Library’, ‘Appeals & Petitions’, ‘Around the UK/World’ and others. The new website will however (over time) include links to third party sources in these discontinued genres.

Regretfully some of our archived news will also be lost!
Our domain name will remain as http://www.4wardeveruk.org, and in due course a secondary domain, http://www.4wardever.org.uk

Our primary content such as ‘Case Profiles‘, ‘Archive Downloads‘, ‘Legal Help‘ and ‘Image Galleries‘ etc, will remain albeit in a slightly different format (e.g. Case Profiles, and other content, will be document downloads rather than web pages).

We would like to thank all of our volunteers (past and present) readers, contributors, donors and supporters that have assisted 4WardEverUK over its 17 year history.

“We face neither East nor West; We face forward. All men of goodwill, organize, organize, organize. We prefer self-government in danger, to servitude in tranquility. Forward ever, backward never”
Dr Kwame Nkrumah