YOUR HOME PAGE - www.The-Eversdens.co.uk         January 2006                Tail Corn Reports

It was back in May 2005 when I accidentally got involved with The Eversdens website. Alan Huddleston rashly told me he was looking to freshen up the site and I found myself offering to make a new front page for consideration. Next I thought I might try to make a contents page – and one thing led to another until (emboldened by Alan’s encouragement) I had restructured and remodelled the whole thing.

The site had become very rich in content, but it had grown piecemeal and so it was easy to get lost in it. Happily, I didn’t have to search for material. There were masses of it. It just needed a shape and a “house style”.

The idea was to make the site more like a glossy magazine with lots of colour and visual material. I also wanted to make it easy to use.

My credentials as a webmaster (!) are pretty sparse. I can grapple with HTML coding when necessary but rely heavily on FrontPage. FrontPage is a WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”) website authoring programme that does most of the hard work for you. It allows you to concentrate on page design rather than technicalities. Professionals favour another programme (that costs about £500). FrontPage is quite versatile enough for me. It came bundled in Microsoft Office 2000 and languished for a while before I realised what it was. The-Eversdens is my fourth (and very much largest) website.

I turned to Alan Huddleston for technical know-how about such matters as domain names and glitches in the Guest Book or Calendar. But I eventually took Alan at his word and just did it my way. My way is that of an enthusiastic amateur. The site has been formally adopted by the Parish Council but I have assumed a free hand editorially and graphically! So mistakes of fact and taste are mine. The Council has pledged £50 a year towards costs – but there aren’t many. The web space is free. We pay for the Calendar. The Guest Book and Counter are free. (I don’t charge for my time which Val believes the whole parish precept wouldn’t cover!)

My third website had about ten pages and a few pictures. The-Eversdens is made up of five different websites seamlessly linked (Master, Pictures1, Pictures2, PC Minutes, and Jack McCollum’s Tail Corn archive) and dozens of Events websites within the Pictures websites.  At the last count the site (excluding the Tail Corn archive) totalled 5143 files! It is still well under 30 megabytes. Only one page should take longer than 15 seconds to load. With Broadband, of course, loading should be almost instantaneous. PlusNet Pay-as-you-go provides the web space and I use another freebie, Core FTP, to publish to the web. I still think of this as sending it up into the sky. Every day I marvel at the technology. We have lived through a revolution, haven’t we!

The (free) counter shows that about 30 people a day visit the site of whom around 20 are regulars. Several use The-Eversdens as their Home Page (Control Panel > Internet Options > Home Page) which definitely makes the NEW items (and updates on Barrington) worth doing. The counter gives me a mass of information such as the size of visitors’ screens, time spent on each page, their route through the site, and more. Most fascinating, though, are the places of origin. Most visitors, of course, are from the Cambridge area. But we have had visitors from all over. Have a look at the list of places. You probably recognise some of the links with the Eversdens. Most remain a mystery to me. Wouldn’t you like to know who our distant visitors are? Wouldn’t it be good to get a line from them!

The site is well-worth exploring. It can short-cut tedious searches and also rewards browsing. Some Eversden people use it as a way of keeping in touch with what’s on in the village. To meet that need, you the user will have to keep me the editor informed. If you tell me what and when, I can enter events on the What’s On Calendar for you.

I am happy keeping the website going but I cannot become the village news-sleuth! Nor can I be the village chronicler of events – although I usually have my camera close by. If you have a batch of pictures of an event, I will try to use them. Thirty or so to choose from (on CD or emailed) would be ideal.

The counter reveals that our distant visitors do like to keep up with parish council news as well as the pictures of events. This suggests that the site is used by “exiles” and distant relatives to get a taste of home. I like that.

I confess that the fun was in redesigning the site. Refreshing it and keeping it up to date is less fascinating! I plan to renew Glimpses of The Eversdens seasonally. However, if you have an interest – such as a mention on the Local Businesses page, or the Clubs page, or wherever, I hope you would not wait for me to contact you for your new programme or changes in personnel. Email is definitely the best way to keep me up to speed.

So that’s it. It will soon be a year on. It’s a well-guarded secret how easy it is to get “a presence” on the World Wide Web. If you have relatives across the world, a little site of your own would be a joy to them. They could be looking at pictures of your new kitchen within minutes of it being installed! I might be able to help you get started. Until then, make sure they have our address and coax them to make www.The-Eversdens.co.uk  their Home page – and to drop me a line.

Since July 2005 we have had visitors from: