Dear Messenger
It is with a certain sadness that I hear you are no longer producing your website edition, other than publishing your print copy as an Adobe PDF file, for the foreseeable future! Surely this is a retrogade step.
The web edition of the Burngreave Messenger has become the de facto historical source of information on our area. Want to know the history of Woodside, Carwood, Abbeyfield Park House, or Shirecliffe? Google for them, and the Burngreave Messenger’s quality reporting is the number one hit.
Yes, Google will index PDF files, but given the choice of a 20 minute download or something quicker (when all you require is some specific information) what would you take? There is an unofficial Burngreave Messenger web site available here:
http://aland.burngreave.net/community/messenger/
Sure, its not as pretty as your highly-engineered official site, but it’s a lot cheaper to maintain, easy to navigate (now you don’t release your content as plain web pages), and easily indexable by search engines.
Please consider linking to it from your official web site – this would aid search engines in ranking your content – and perhaps helping to make it look better by providing positive criticism, and support.
Do you have plans to take on another ILM worker to help you regain your capacity to maintain your own web site?
Alan Dawson
Dear Alan,
We are very proud of our site, which was started and maintained for several years by volunteers, and then a web developer, employed through the Step Up scheme, similar to ILM. This has now finished. He is now employed with us to work on the New Deal website, and has had no time to maintain our own site. We were unable take on another ILM-type worker because we can’t support any more people at present.
However, we think we have a technical solution to the problem and hope to have the full Messenger available as HTML pages again soon. Thanks for the push! – [ed]