First anniversary of the launch of Audlem Online

A year ago today Audlem's new website was launched. The webteam had set itself the daunting task of publishing at least one news story every day. We are glad to say that's a target we have managed to achieve. In fact the year has seen 848 news stories published. Not bad for a small village!

A few have had quite an impact – the man-hunt for burglars who had broken into The Bridge involving six police cars and a police aeroplane attracted our best yet daily readership. Our story about the Weaver Valley Regional Park, which initially excluded the upper Weaver Valley and Audlem, resulted in a change of heart at the County Council and Audlem is now the southern gateway to the new park which stetches right across central Cheshire. The announcement of the Village of the Year results also attracted a large readership and was a wonderful story to report.

The readership figures have grown and grown, helped by the massive increase in Broadband usage locally and elsewhere. In the early months we were pleased to get 1,000 or so readers a month. That figure is now around 5,000. In fact 37,597 have logged on to Audlem Online in the year. And while we are on statistics, our technical guru John Gunstone tells us the webteam has typed just under 3,000,000 characters – and some of us mainly with one finger!

There is now a mass of information about local businesses, services and tourist information in the 'Information' section. And we have run a dozen Vote Polls on local issues.

Some of the 'Forum' topics have been lively, indeed heated, particularly in recent weeks. We have had issues to decide, such as whether 'Anons' were ok. We decided they were, although our anti- bell-ringing and flag-flying Anon has stirred up many emotional comments. And, we guess, enjoyed every minute.

We've had only two complaints so far, one about a 'Forum' comment and another a news story. We will be publishing a Complaints Policy shortly so that any complaints can always be dealt with properly.

To our regular readers, and the many people who send us news stories, articles, forum contributions, a big thank you. An equally big thank you to our sponsors, who allowed Audlem Online to be set up in the first place. Finally, to everyone who visits Audlem Online, we hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoy producing it.

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.