Community Development Trust

DEVELOPMENT TRUST

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Mobile phone campaign
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Brief Report on the Trust Website
for
Consideration at the EC meeting 10 09 09

Much progress has been made on the Trust’s web site, which now features a great deal of content. The community section features agendas, minutes and accounts for both the Trust and the PC. Good routines have been established to keep these elements up to date. Routines to update the times of church services for both St Peter’s and the Methodist Chapel are also well established. Some of the local groups, for example the WI and the History Group, are making good use of the site. The latter is beginning to accumulate a useful archive of historical photographs and documents. Other groups, such as the Art Club, Leek Club, are beginning to make use of the site.

I am working with Craster organisations and Doris Clark, who maintains the diary for the Memorial Hall, to fill out the Craster Diary so that it is as full a picture of events in Craster as possible.

The visitors section of the site contains a great deal that is of interest and use for visitors to Craster. The food and drink section is nearly complete. The accommodation section is the outstanding area for development. The B&B section is well on the way to being complete and I am now working on the self catering and camping & caravanning sections.

The site is now attracting links from other sites, including the Northumberland AONB ‘Our Coast, Our Sea’ site. The B&B’s are linking their sites. Craster TIC is using the site with visitors. The site is becoming more obvious on Google, but still has some way to go. There are technical improvements that I could make to the site which will help and I will work on them in due course.

Matters to Consider

I would be grateful if the Executive Committee would consider the following.

• The web site is only useful if people know about it. A publicity campaign to increase awareness would ‘spread the word’. The following steps could be taken.

1. Notify local newspapers.

2. Flier to be included in the Net.

3. Posters in prominent locations. A small budget would purchase simple frames for posters in the TIC, Smokehouse shop etc.

• The following working practices have been adopted during the development stage of the site. I would be grateful if the EC would decide if they will continue to be implemented.

1. The site promotes local businesses offering food, drink and accommodation. In line with the constitution of the Trust, which states its geographical sphere of interest as ‘for the benefit of the community who live or work in the civil parish of Craster’, only those businesses within the parish have been included. This means that businesses outside the parish are not promoted on the site.

2. The site has set the rule that businesses should supply pictures and text to have a page on the site and not just a link to a website hosted elsewhere. The rationale behind this is to make sure that the Trust’s web site contains sufficient information, to meet visitors’ needs. Once a visitor clicks off a site, the return rate is limited.

3. Pages on the site have been offered free of charge to all community groups. The principle so far adopted for businesses has been not to make a charge, but a request that they make a voluntary contribution of £5 to cover the cost of the site to the Trust.

• I would like to propose that the Trust nominates, from within the EC, a ‘web site champion’, whose role would be to promote the use of the web site for publicising Trust business. The Trust’s pages on the site include separate pages on the NWL sewage scheme, the mobile phone campaign, the playground etc. If these pages are not updated from time to time they loose credibility. Also new Trust initiatives should, if the Trust is consistent, be written up for the site.

Peter Howard
Site Administrator
Sept 2 nd 2009