Website News: October 2008 Archives

We hope that you like the new look News pages - the Bishopthorpe blog. The new styles allow us to take advantage of some of the new features of the latest release of software, such as additional pages, and membership facilities.

When you read a story here and in other new-look pages you will see a little speech bubble and a blue star next to the date.

Click on the speech bubble to comment on what you have read. If you have registered as Bish dot net member your comment should appear straightaway. If not it will be held for approval by site editors.

You can sign up to be a member - and comment and even write your own stories (more on this later).

Click on the blue star if you like a particular story - give it a star rating for interest or whatever!

For some time now Bish dot net has hosted a blog written by our local City of York Councillor.

This has been expanded into a web site that is now live here.

Our Bishopthorpe site had a nice mention recently on another web site produced by Will Perrin (who I am told works at the Cabinet Office). He says:

The internet is the first port for new information these days - ask any encyclopedia salesman. The internet can define how places appear to the world.  For cities Google turns up loads of web pages - many of them commercial.  But in the UK search engines turn up very little content by local people for small communities and even large towns.   So good local websites, firmly about a place, frequently updated by volunteers stand out and often do well in Google. The less well known a place is the more a good local community site can rise to the top of popular search engines and define the place online.

A great example is the little village of Bishopthorpe (pop. 3,000) just south of York ... linked to a marvellous community site there run by volunteers. Bishopthorpe is a small village, and the site is only updated a few times a month.  But it is the only substantial online presence for the village and (the) site rises effortlessly to the top of search engines. And it plays a strong role in how Bishopthorpe is presented to the world.

You can read more about this here.