Tenth Birthday today

AudlemOnline was launched ten years ago today. We are celebrating that auspicious occasion with a major redesign which will make the website much easier to read on phones and tablets.

The upgrade required a lot of work yesterday which meant the website had to be closed down for much of Monday. Our apologies for the inconvenience but hopefully you will like the result of the redesign, our fifth 'new look' over the ten years.

The change-over also meant that the news team had no access to the system yesterday which means we will be catching up with news coverage today and tomorrow.

The editor would like to thank the technical team led by John Gunstone of ThenMedia for all their work. There is also a major overhaul of all the photographic galleries by Alvar Jones as the number of photos held on file was reaching unsustainable proportions.

As we said a week ago in an article, 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 14,256 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.

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

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.