The Jones Jones Jones Concert has been launched, and I uploaded the accompanying website last night, jones.tv.

S4C and Cwmni Da are launching an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most number of people in the same place with the same surname. The previous record of 583 is held by the Norbergs of Sweden, and we hope to smash the record at the concert to celebrate the name Jones.

The site has been built with WordPress, the extremely popular open source blogging software. WordPress comes with many different and varied themes, but for this project I have had to design my own. This called for some (X)HTML, CSS and PHP skills, and after a frantic two days I have it looking the way I want (in Firefox, Safari, Flock and IE6.0).

Also a big challenge was to get the system working in a bilingual way. Although there are some plugins available to do this, I did not have the time to implement them. I opted for a simple system of having two categories for the posts, Cymraeg and English. I then use these two categories at the head of the page to link to the posts. WordPress uses static posts as for the information pages, and creating the pages as children of a Welsh page and an English page, then using CSS to hide these two 'parent' pages.

Articles have appeared in some of the national daily newspapers, and some of the producers have been speaking with radio shows, including some from Australia. So everyone expects the website to attract lots of attention.

We will be using the site to announce acts and artists that will be appearing at the concert. As WordPress is a blogging tool, this makes it an ideal choice for adding content to the website easily and quickly, and it also takes care of the management of the site, and creates RSS feeds automatically.

I will be updating the site constantly from now on, to update with news of the concert and to keep it looking fresh.