Wellesbourne and Walton Community Web - Who, What, Where, Why...

There are a number of sites claiming to be Wellesbourne's "Village" or "Community" site, or mentioning one or more of these elements (look on the More... page, under Neighbours for the latest links):

www.wellesbourne.co.uk, the original site set up by Mick Stallard to adddress businesses in Wellesbourne and Walton. It is no longer in use, but still owned by Mick.

http://warkcom.net ("Warwickshire Communities") features some Wellesbourne entities, notably the VLO and WAG. Warkcom will be closing in early 2010; users have been notified and alternative facilities are being looked at.

www.thelocalchannel.co.uk/Wellesbourne: This calls itself the Wellesbourne Community site, and even features a small picture of Chestnut Square. (It calls us the Village site). It's where the Parish Council put their minutes, agendas etc., so the place to look for that sort of thing. The WPC are now getting Agendas up ahead of meetings, which is helpful.

www.saintpeterswellesbourne.com: In 2008 St Peter's Church created yet another site. This one is more of a forum, so more interactive than the existing site. Currently (Sep 2009) experiencing encryption issues following a security breach.

www.wellesbourne-business.co.uk aka Protect Wellesbourne: activated in August 2009 to concentrate information regarding possible adverse developments in the village.

www.wellesbourne.f9.co.uk, this, the Community site, where you'll find stuff about the two villages and their communities.

This was set up in around 1998 by Rev Norman Howes and a dedicated band of enthusiasts who gradually dwindled away until there was just me to keep it going. In 2005 I streamlined the entry pages and monthly news sections, with each page fewer clicks away than before, in a more logical and up-to-date layout. Most of the old-look pages are being kept on, such as amenities, clubs etc., as there seems little point in changing them, but whenever a page is updated the mouse code is stripped out (as it doesn't work any more). Now the 2009 Index of Shops and Amenities is out I'll start checking that all the links are up to date. Some may transfer to the Council's website (see above). It will evolve with any suggestions I receive, otherwise as I see fit. I have enlarged the welcome screen picture as most people now have 1024x768 screen resolution and above: if anyone's bored with it and wants another one in its place, send it in and I'll consider it. I had thought of putting up 4 views of the same scene in rotation over the 4 seasons, but didn't take it any further.

As a permanent web presence it aims to bring the Newsletter to people outside the parish and provide ready access to static information about the villages. It is now maintained solely by myself, partly out of the goodness of my heart, and partly as practice for my web building skills, so please be patient if it doesn't get published as soon as it might be. I get hard copy up to a week before the end of the preceding month as part of the distribution chain, and nowadays I usually get soft copy from Mac, the editor, which speeds things up enormously; I have fairly good OCR software to scan it with if the soft copy fails, and can now put up about half of it at the start of the month and the rest a week later. (Bumper editions naturally take a bit longer). Any pages that are not ready are listed but not linked to until they are. I fill the pages from the top down, except as follows:

the Safety page is updated as soon as I receive a message;
if I receive any copy during the month a 'Timely Mail' page is published, so if you want your copy published in the first wave, please send it directly to me.
the Church page is updated first if I get the info in good time.

I have given up trying to get a full-time job, so I am able to publish material quite quickly, but I still take holidays, so there may be delays at some times; Pam Copson sadly passed away in November 2006 after being in poor health for some time, and the rest of the people who set the site up have either left the area or are too busy.

There's a full list of who's who on the W&W News on page 2 of the News section, but I may well move it here; for anything you want on the web site, please write to me. I could still do with help on the development, inputting and resolution of any problems mentioned above.

Update Alert

Someone asked for notification when the site changes, in particular, the Action Plan, which came out of Village Voices in 2002-3.
I make changes 2-5 times a month, mainly to add in the current month's news and Police reports, but also to revise pages such as this one as and when I am asked for something or I think of something I think my viewers will find useful. The alert was triggered by a change to the page nominated in the subject of an e-mail created when you click on the link provided on that page (the Update Alert Team confirmed this). Although the Alert domain was renewed in March 2008 for 2 years, it is not functioning at present so I have removed the link from topmenu.
I placed links on the Top Menu page (topmenu.htm, formerly wwnlead.htm, which is now a redirector for this month's news), which changes 1-2 times a month, and in the menu (apmenu.htm) for the Village Voices Action Plan, which was reissued early in 2007 - if I can find the time (and anyone is interested) I'll update it. Any others you want, please write in.

Technical Information

This site was originally designed for a screen width of 640 pixels. That was a long time ago. When I took it over I mainly designed for 800, with an eye to the 640 people. In February 2006 we got a new counter which tells us what resolutions, browsers and operating systems our users have, so I can tailor the site accordingly. Nowadays there's no-one left on 640, but new visitors have appeared on even lower resolutions down to 240x320 so I don't know how they manage! There is only one 800 user, 1024 is the most popular, and 1280 is next; so I'm not too bothered if there are occasional scroll-bars at 800: 1024 and 1280 should be OK. The most popular browser is Internet Explorer on 79%. Netscape is on 18%, but that includes Firefox, masquerading... I try to make sure the pages work with Firefox, but some things don't. These include wmf pictures, alt tags, status line messages on mouseovers, and limiting cell widths. Most of these are in such widespread use that it would be next to impossible to take them out, even if I knew of a workaround, but I have made a start, by changing the one wmf to a transparent-background gif, and adding a title as well as an alt tag to each picture - this is not, however, retroactive. I discovered that wingdings and webdings are not supported in Firefox, so they've been appearing as strange characters - I've replaced some of them with images, but they don't scale as well as fonts so I have to include them at their natural size, which is less satisfactory. Talking of scaling fonts, I've created new percentage based style sheets (wwn05, 6) so you can change the Text Size. I piloted the technique on the Dec'08 Church page, and rolled it out to all news pages and some other pages from Jan'09; my New Year's Resolution is to get all new/ updated pages W3C (css) and WDG (html) compliant as far as I can without spoiling the look. I managed to get drop-caps working in Firefox! Being self-taught, I only pick up this sort of thing as I go along. Any other tips gratefully received!

Computer too slow? The village library has at least four broadband terminals for public use, ½ hour/day free to library members.