by Laura Byrne
The LIFT Network has a new website (liftnet.org.uk). I knew it was coming because I wrote some of the copy for the insurance page. What I didn’t know, until I attended the webinar, was just how many features it has. It was built for LIFT by the first of the webinar’s four presenters, web designer Karo Karczmarek-Giel (karo@karovscode.com), with the newly formed LIFT Website Sub-Committee making the decisions on design, content and functionality. The sub-committee included the other three presenters: Slovakia-based EN-SK-HU legal and financial translator Tamás Méri MITI, lawyer-linguist Sue Leschen FITI, who specialises in legal and business French interpreting and translation, and Italian financial translator and interpreter Andrea Tuzzolo MITI.
The webinar told us the story of how the website came into existence through hundreds of hours of sub-committee meetings and work by sub-committee members. When you think of building a website, it’s easy to imagine you already know just what it should look like and what sort of content it should have. It’s only when you come to make the individual decisions on text and images that you realise how many factors you need to take into account to give it the right look and feel and how hard it is to write copy for a website. Sue explained that the committee wanted the LIFT website’s look to be modern and attractive to potential clients. And she, Andrea and Tamás described just how much work went into that.
The website that they created is slick and polished, featuring a database of translators and interpreters that you can search by subject specialism and language. The information in the database comes from the spreadsheet that LIFT members regularly update, so any MITI or FITI member on the spreadsheet can now also be found in the website database. At the webinar, we were also invited to add more information to our profiles. Andrea Tuzzolo, Sue Leschen or Tamás Méri’s profiles are perfect examples of what that can look like. There’s also a “Member of the Month” feature on the About Us page. Member of the Month, at the time of writing, was Sue Leschen, and other LIFT members are invited to submit their profiles for this feature via the dedicated form shared on the forum and in the event handout. Search engines tend to favour websites that are regularly updated, so this, along with the news page, which members can also contribute to, will help to keep the website visible. Karo recommended that LIFT members get the best out of the site by treating it as part of our marketing, pointing potential clients to the site directory or our own profile, featuring as Member or the Month or writing news articles.