AudlemOnline's 10th birthday

AudlemOnline is coming up to its 10th birthday later this month.

Our very first item, published on 25th August 2005, was hardly inspiring. Why, oh why, didn't we consider something like: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"

Instead, all we managed was a pathetic: "Audlem news is written by a number of local authors, and is updated on a daily basis. If you think you have an interesting item for the news team please email....." and finished with our then email address.

In the early days it was, we have to admit, a struggle to get one story a day – Wednesdays were easiest as we could pop into Williams' newsagents and pinch a story from the Chronicle.

The readership was pretty small too – about 30 people a day on average – but we were determined to avoid the trap so many village websites fall into: a great effort to set them up, then nothing changes for weeks so nobody bothers clicking on again after a few attempts.

Our solution was to opt for at least one fresh news story every day. And so far, we have managed ten years without missing a single day with well over 14,000 local stories published over the 3,652 days.

The readership has grown and grown – now typically over 2,400 readers a day or about 70,000 a month.

There has been a number of redesigns too and there's another major step forward coming next week with the look of AudlemOnline being updated to be far more flexible and making it easier to read on mobile phones and tablets.

We are also glad to report we have won a few awards and are currently 'Cheshire Village Website of the Year'.

We hope you won't mind if, over the coming days, we indulge in a positive orgy of celebrations of our 10th birthday with a look back on some of our top reports, a few of which have gone viral around the world, some of which have made us chortle and doubtless one or two that have made you yell with outrage.

There's been a fair bit of campaigning too and we are always pleased that the 'power of the media' can get things done so often.

In the meantime, a big thank you to all our contributors and readers for creating the news that we report, sending us stories and reading what we put out to inform you, and hopefully entertain you, every day of the year.

We on the webteam are looking forward to the next ten years!

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.