Sixty years of a local history magazine, searchable down to the page.
The Queenstown & District Historical Society has looked after the history of the Whakatipu since 1965, and since 1966 it has published the Queenstown Courier twice a year: 114 issues of researched articles, memoirs and Society news. That archive is the most valuable thing the Society owns, and on the old site it was a list of PDF links you had to already know how to use.
The job was to rebuild the site from scratch, make the whole archive findable by anyone, and hand it back so volunteers can run it without a developer.
One search box in the header covers everything: the site’s pages, the history stories, the events programme, all 2,140 entries in the Society’s own Courier index, and the full text of 2,421 magazine pages. Every page has been machine-read, so a search for a surname, a mine or a hut finds the page it is printed on, with the matching words highlighted.
Every magazine result opens the issue at that page. That sounds simple and is not: phones ignore page links inside PDFs, so the site carries its own reader, and a link to page 23 of issue 108 lands on page 23 on any device. The raw PDF is always one tap away.
The archive itself is a wall of covers in five-year blocks, and its index search answers as you type. The search runs in the browser against indexes built at deploy, so there is no search service to pay for or keep alive.
The district’s history is told in six eras, from the early times through the gold rush to the present, with stories nested under each. Facts carry citations to the Courier issue and page they came from, and the build refuses to publish a citation that points nowhere, so the history stays checkable.
A map of the district, drawn from LINZ topographic data, pins thirteen historic places from Kinloch to Kingston. Each place links to the stories about it and to every Courier index entry that names it. The events programme on the site runs back to the 1980s, with reports and photographs from each season.
The Society publishes its own stories, events and Courier issues through an editor built for it. No software to install, no code, no file names: a volunteer signs in with an emailed code and follows five short steps. Here is a real event going up on 20 October 2026.
The event’s name and date; the editor asks only for what the card needs.
The report as the Society wrote it, paragraphs separated by a blank line.
Dropped straight in from a phone or a desktop; the editor shrinks each one and asks where it came from and what it shows, so every picture is credited and described.
Optional, and left empty for now: once the Courier prints its report of the event, the issue and page go here and the card links straight to that page.
The finished card as it will read, then one button.
Before anything goes live the site runs its own checks: a story that cites a page that does not exist, or a picture without a credit, is refused with a plain sentence saying why. When the checks pass the site rebuilds and the Society is emailed. Start to live is a few minutes; this is the same event on the Society’s site.
All 138 addresses from the old site redirect to their new homes, so bookmarks, printed references and old search links still land. The site went live in September 2026. It is fully static: no database, nothing to patch, and quick on a phone.
Every account, from the domain to the hosting to the editor, is in the Society’s name.
Seeking to update our old website to make it easier for a wide range of users to navigate, we chose Chris because he took time to examine our needs and listened so thoughtfully. He has delivered an attractive bespoke website which far surpasses our expectations. It’s now easy for tourists, newcomers and researchers to use. Our treasure trove of historical magazines is now fully searchable. Chris has been a pleasure to work with throughout.
Jane Peasey, Director of the Lakes District Museum in Arrowtown, where the archive is used by researchers of all ages, describes it as a valuable resource where it is very easy to search for a required article or topic.
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