Financial Update
It was always the intention (once website hosting and other running costs had been covered) for the listings money to be paid forward into the community. I’m pleased to say that this year we had a surplus of £104, which will be donated equally to the swimming pool and the church.
All work done on the website itself by the team continues to be on a voluntary basis.
What we’ve achieved in 2019
2019 has been a busy year for ‘Greystoke Online’. We’ve added an events calendar to the website to showcase what’s going on in the village, and also a News section, where the Greystoke section of the Together magazine is published each month, along with any other news. A big thank you to John Bridges, who uploads all the Together magazine content and events every month, often before the magazine hits letterboxes!
We had over 17,500 website pageviews for 2019 and the website continues to rank exceptionally highly on Google – position #3 for “Greystoke” and position #4 for “Greystoke Cumbria”. In addition business listings feature on the first page of google searches.
The Facebook group now has nearly 350 members, and we regularly cross-post to the website. We’ve also created a Twitter account with over 150 followers, where we can further publicise village events. As an example, tweets on the Macmillan coffee mornings reached over 1200 people, and the Open Gardens tweets reached over 3000, with people on the day saying they’d found out about the event on Twitter!
Plans for 2020
We are committed to further improving the website for the community in 2020. As of last week, you can now see the latest news on the front page We’re hoping to start collating some local history (both written and oral) to document the village, and plan to create a history blog. Stay tuned on this one – it’s been talked about for a while and hopefully we’re getting a little closer to organising. All details will be published here when we have them!
We’re also in talks with Visit Cumbria about getting the Greystoke entry updated so it links back to the website, Facebook group and Twitter account.
Thanks
Firstly, huge thanks to John Bridges for updating the website with the Together magazine content every month – and adding all the events to the events calendar.
Secondly thank you to all of you who have taken out a listing and supported us last year – we hope you renew this year (no price increase!).
Thirdly thanks to Simon Scott-Harden who takes care of all the technical stuff (like our security certificate, domain registration and hosting).
