alderleyedge.com celebrates its 1st birthday

alderleyedge.com is a year old this week. In one respect the time has flown by and it doesn’t seem possible that we are celebrating our first anniversary, on the other hand so much has happened in our village in the past 12 months. 

To mark our first birthday we thought we’d take a look back at our achievements and also look forward to the next 12 months - touching on our plans for the site and hopefully obtain some feedback from our readers about what we’ve done right and where we’ve gone wrong.

alderleyedge.com now reaches a very significant portion of the local community, last month we had just under 5000 unique users visit the site and we now have over 1000 registered members receiving our monthly newsletter.

We have established good working relationships with our 3 village schools, churches, many local businesses, the police, departments and individuals within Cheshire East Council, charities, sports clubs and associations - all of whom have become involved and hopefully value the role we play in sharing local knowledge.

Thanks to the support of our local police, we were able to break a major news story last month when the body of gangster Stephen Akinyemi was found at the house of Arran Coghlan on Brook Lane. Overnight the reach of alderleyedge.com went far beyond our village.

alderleyedge.com has also proved successful in reaching diverse sections of the community, with a wide range of views, and has attracted members of all ages and backgrounds. We even have a restaurant review from an 11 year old.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive and some members are really engaging with the site. A couple of weeks ago we published a letter written by the Girl Guides District Commissioner. As a result of this article not only did they find a new Rainbow leader, preventing the Alderley Edge unit from having to close, but two new helpers also came forward, all in the space of a week.

This month we also wrote about Wilmslow resident Mark Shields, who has been unemployed for 12 months and recently took part in the filming of the BBC documentary Famous, Rich, Jobless. Our article generated considerably more press coverage for Mark and also resulted in a job interview, because a director at Virgin Media read our piece.

In October we launched our sister site wilmslow.co.uk and recently I joined the world of Twitter, which is how I found out about Mark Shields’ story. At first I was sceptical but it is actually a very good tool, providing access to real time information - so follow us on Twitter for the latest information on Alderley Edge, as we hear about it.

We are currently in the process of upgrading the website to hopefully improve the user experience, add some new features and integrate the various sections of the site to assist you in finding content of interest.

The next version of alderleyedge.com is not going to be revolutionary but it does lay the foundations so we can make some major improvements over the course of the year. The site was launched using a commercial content management system but we will be moving to a platform which we (that’s the royal we) have specifically built to fit our requirements and provide us with flexibility going forward.

We would very much like to thank you all for your support and the very generous feedback we have received to date. We really do want to know what you like about the site, what you dislike and anything else you would like us to cover.

We want alderleyedge.com to serve the community as best it can so we really do need to hear your views. Please get in touch via the comment box below or by email.

Finally we want to express our gratitude to local businesses who have supported our efforts, particular thanks must go to Andy at Horseshoe Farm for kindly displaying our banner and Jude and her team at Costa who generously display our marketing material.

Tags:

Alderleyedge.com