On a cold, wet and windy 22nd of March,
with traces of snow still on the ground,
(remember those days?)
jackh141.sg-host.com was re-launched with an appropriate fanfare of computer keys.
Gathered in Geddington Primary School’s computer suite were the website’s committee, Janet Jones, Tony Locock and Pam Hopkins, accompanied by Councillor Ken Barber, and Jane Rowley with eight of her Digital Leaders from the school’s computer club.
Now, just over three months later, we can report on the site’s progress.
We are delighted to welcome two more sponsors: Geddington Parish Council and Geddington Bowls Club, bringing the total up to nine. You can see the complete list at the bottom of most pages and the section next to the list is a revolving paragraph, showing each sponsor in turn.
You may wonder why we now need sponsors, when the old site didn’t appear to need any. The simple answer is that we have to pay for the new hosting arrangement. Octagon Creative has created our website on WordPress, which is an exciting and very flexible host. We are using the professional .com version and are fortunate to be able to get support at ACRE (Action with Communities in Rural England), at Hunsbury Hill in Northampton, as they have set up a Community Website Forum. At a recent Forum meeting, at which over 30 local website representatives attended, from villages all over the county, we discovered that many of our problems were being experienced by most of those there:
We weren’t alone!
We are also able to monitor our ‘stats’. They show that in the last three months, the site was hit over 14,300 times – the Latest News page getting the most visits, but our best day was that of the PA’s Street Fair last Sunday – 522 hits, closely followed by the Great Garage Sale. So, if you have an event coming up, it’s worth your while to let us know about it, send us the poster, tell us what’s on – we can help publicise it.
Our sponsors are getting good value for their money!
But to get back to our site, we can now offer three types of service:
1 Mention in the Directory – free to all village organisations
2 A Link to a page or other website – at a cost of £10 per annum
3 Sponsorship which includes a link to a second page or website, and the company/organisation name and image/logo on a revolving space on the pages – cost £15 per annum.
Our contact, if you wish to take advantage of any of these services, is Treasurer Janet Jones, 1 West St, Geddington email: treasurer@geddington.net
Don’t forget: Entry in the Village Directory is available to ALL village organisations and businesses – please get in touch so that we can include your details.
So what is there still to be done?
Well, to start with, Geddington has so much history and we have so little on the site at present. So, we’ll be increasing the pages of the History section and we’ll also be re-organising and increasing the Photo Gallery. In the meantime, we’ll be adding to the News, Diary and Events pages as soon as we get the information. This, of course, is where you come in. We can only publish this information as and when we are given it, so if you have any input, we’d love to hear it. We would also like to have Comments on any issue that appears on the site.
It’s easy to do, just contact us at editor@geddington.net