A daily local news site, kept publishing every day

What the site is

The Chiswick Calendar is a community news, events and lifestyle website serving the Chiswick area of West London. It operates as a Community Interest Company and publishes as a daily local news site — news articles, event listings, film and theatre coverage, and community features, produced by a sizeable editorial team (the site has a whole team page). It also runs a digital Club Card offering local shopping discounts, a directory of the businesses in the Club Card scheme, a children’s directory, tide times, cinema listings and a jobs board. Revenue comes from advertising (programmatic and direct) and Club Card memberships — a one-time signup fee, not a subscription.

The challenge

The Chiswick Calendar is content-heavy, publishes daily, and pays for itself with ad revenue. The editorial side is well covered by its team; what it needed was a development partner who could handle custom development, advertising infrastructure, email systems and server performance — without the overhead of a full technical department. That’s my half of the partnership: when there’s a technical problem, it lands on my desk.

What I build and manage

Dawn Wilson of DW Multimedia created the site and leads it to this day; I joined in 2019 as the development half of the partnership, and over a multi-year engagement have handled the technical side of its operation.

Custom plugins. A custom homepage plugin, a digital Club Card system integrated with Google Wallet and Apple Wallet, the Club Card business directory, a children’s directory, cinema listings, tide-times functionality, and a donation system.

Advertising operations. Configured and managed Advanced Ads for on-site placements, ran the London Bath Co sponsorship, and created sponsorship slots across the site. Currently migrating the whole operation from Advanced Ads to Google Ad Manager. Provided regular advertising statistics and revenue reports.

Email. Optimised Mailchimp deliverability for the newsletters (the platform was in place before I arrived — getting the emails to actually land was the job), and moved the team’s Outlook email hosting from GoDaddy to Microsoft directly for better management.

Events and listings. Optimised the design of the events calendar and improved its functionality — the system that powers the “What’s On” section.

Chiswick Cinema listings. A custom plugin that queries Chiswick Cinema’s GraphQL API and populates their listings on the Calendar site automatically, linking through to the cinema for bookings.

Server and performance. All hosting and server infrastructure on SiteGround — performance optimisation, caching, CDN, SSL, DNS, email configuration, plus migrations and server upgrades.

Ongoing operations. Bug fixes, general maintenance and user support. The content is the editorial team’s department these days — solving the technical problems is mine.

Special projects. The Bedford Park Festival photography competition — I help host and manage the online half of the competition on the Calendar site — plus direct-sponsor advertising campaigns.

Why it matters

This is the deepest version of “real partner”: when a publisher pays its bills with daily traffic and direct sponsorships, every technical decision has a revenue consequence. Multi-year engagements like this one are how the enterprise side of the work happens — by being the person who actually understands the whole stack.

Built with

Both the Chiswick Calendar and its sister project, the Chiswick Directory, are a partnership with Dawn Wilson of DW Multimedia. Dawn created the Calendar and leads it; I joined later as the developer and have handled the technical side ever since. On the Directory we built together as co-developers.

The Club Card, in the wild

The digital Club Card as members actually carry it — issued through the Google Wallet and Apple Wallet APIs. No scanners involved: members simply show the card to get the discount.