Welcome to the July 2007 issue of Great Baddow Online Newsletter

Unsubscribe (Cease mailings)

See the bottom of page for instructions on how to stop copies of this newsletter being sent to you.

 
Introduction

For newcomers to the site, this newsletter is circulated monthly to registered site members and friends, to supplement information on the site itself. Please forward to colleagues and other interested individuals in order to publicise the site.

If you are a recent newcomer to the site, welcome - your readership is appreciated.

This month has seen the commencement of a general overhaul of the site and improvements to both content and layout. We have introduced the following new features:

• Information about the weekly meetings of the Worldwide Church of God.   This fellowship meets on Saturdays in the United Reformed Church building. (Please note that it has no formal religious connection with the URC).
• Additional photographs added to the site courtesy of Allen Buckroyd. Allen is a local historian and has a  collection of both historic and present day photographs of the village.  This set of 4 photos shows examples of local areas of interest in the village, with a mix of old and new; modern images such as the Vineyards Tower block, and the old horse trough adjacent to the village sign. Allen is also responsible for coordinating the effort in developing the DVD (see below).
• Addition of photo icons for bus and train timetables.  The bus timetables were  updated on 19 June 2007 and validated against the May 2007 timetables issued by Essex County Council. Overall there are very few minor changes but we will continue to post changes as and when we become aware of them.
• Minor updating and the addition of photographs to accompany the descriptions of the three walks around Baddow. One of the weaknesses of the site is that it is generally very textually oriented, and as a consequence is less attractive than some 'glitzy' sites. We hope that by adding more images to accompany text content, the content will be made more interesting.
• Information provided about the planned production of a DVD about the village. We repeat the invitation to anyone with photographs, recordings or video of any historic events which took place in the village over the last century and willing to consider loaning them for possible use in this project to contact us via myself. We are particularly interested in records of visits by VIPs, incidents (e.g flooding in the 50s), famous local residents.
• Creation of a business index.   This is intended to provide details of all businesses and organisations in the village operating from commercial premises. It specifically excludes home based individuals.  It provides a classified listing by business type and lists the name, address and telephone number (where known) and is as complete as possible for organisations in:
• Baddow Road
• Beehive Lane
• Bringy
• Church Street
• High Street
• Maldon Road
• Meadgate Avenue shops
• Vineyards
• West Hanningfield Road.

• Minor updating of the home page to display the date. The front page has not changed over a year and the introduction to the site is now outdated. 

The site as it has developed has become very textually oriented, and may be considered unexciting by some visitors.  Although there is no intention to create  a comic effect with many pictures illustrating each 'story', we do plan to start breaking up the text with more graphics and visuals.  This will make it more interesting without we hope, detracting from the ongoing development of  news and events.  However, we still need input from members and friends!

One ambitious plan is to create a more comprehensive index of local businesses within the Great Baddow area, akin to "yellow pages" elsewhere. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions mean that it is not possible to simply reproduce information from other publications, and hence the information must be derived from general, publically available information such as shop fronts etc.

• Reorganisation of the front page.  We intend to work within the constraints of the present cms 'skin' ; i.e the overall style and structure of the site but intend to have a front page which changes more frequently, with the addition of some new content to the home page itself, either as links or as primary text./image content. The aim is to provide the visitor with revised content on a regular basis, and encourage searching across the site.
• Diary facility. We aim to update the summary listing of all local organisations meeting in the village and provide a monthly calendar ordered by day of week and providing the name of the organisation, the date, time and place of regular meetings (e.g. third Wednesday, 7.30pm Parish hall) and a contact (where this is published).
• RSS feed. An RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feed enables you to see when a website has provided new comment by automatically updating entires in a corresponding news aggregator whioch you load as an application on your computer. It then enables you to see new content within the aggregator without having to visit the original site.  We propose to add a news feed for all exisitng and future newsletters and once trialled will consider providing additional feeds for other areas of the site.

Over the last month the number of unique visitors has reduced slightly but the number of page views per visitor and time on site continues to rise slowly. A detailed update will again be provided next month. What is apparent is that some sections of the site are hardly visited at all and hence a reason for reviewing the content and restructuring further. One set of pages which will be removed from public view is "Shopping Mall" where there has been limited access for some time.

We offer our congratulations to Sandon WI,  which has taken first prize at the Essex WI Federation's event  "Roses, roses all the way!" which took place at the Cathedral on Thursday/Friday 27/28 June. Their entry created by several members won first prize for their display and a number of members also won awards for individual entries in various classes. 

Because so many of us receive junk email, if on receiving this or any other issue you do not wish to receive any further editions, please accept my apologies; to stop future issues mailed to you, simply email me with the subject line “stop e-newsletter”, and I will delete you from the mailing list. If you have read the newsletter online and would like to receive it by email, please email me with the subject line entry “start e-newsletter”.

Chris Harvey
Site manager
1 July 2007

Email Chris Harvey