This week marks 1 year since we made the first post on WV11.co.uk!

We’ve decided to celebrate by thanking everyone who has contributed to the website; either by sending us news, commenting on articles, supporting us on Facebook and Twitter, emailing us with messages of support or advertising on the site. THANK YOU!!!

Special thanks also go to: Simon Hamilton, Kate Hughes, Irene Dodd, Manjeet Singh, PCSO Matt Bailey, Bryan & Gemma Murphy, the members of WAAN and Sabcat Printing.

The site has come a long way in the past 12 months and whilst we’re only a team of two, we’re really pleased with the response we’ve had from the local community. It’s great when we bump into someone we don’t know and they’ve heard of the site and we hope that WV11.co.uk continues to be a valuable resource to the people of Wednesfield.

We’d love more people to get involved with the website, so if you’d like to contribute or you have any views on what we should be writing about, please email us on info@wv11.co.uk or call/text us on 07855 409 319.

For those of you who are into stats, here’s a run down of figures from our first year…

Visitor Statistics:

Total visits: 22,213
Unique visitors: 16,670
Average number of visitors per month:  1,389

Total page views: 50,987
Unique page views: 39,693

68% of visitors have come from search engines
13% of visitors have come directly from typing WV11.co.uk into their browsers
10% of visitors have come from other sites linking to us
7% of visitors have come fromfrom other sources

Facebook ‘fans’: 981
Twitter followers: 201

Posts Statistics:

Average number of posts per month: 20.8
Average number of words per post: 227
Total number of posts: 250
Total number of words in posts: 56,715

Top 5 most popular posts/pages:

Home page: 8,955 views
Bentley Bridge news category: 2,731 views
Cosmo Pan Asian restaurant opens: 2,946 views
Pure Gym opening soon: 2,351 views
New Aldi store coming to Wednesfield: 1,593 views

Birthday cake photo by Omer Wazir.

The Fayre is a charity event and all funds raised will be donated to local charity Compton Hospice.

WV11.co.uk will have a stall at the fayre and will be handing out flyers to promote the website – we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the kind of local news you’d like to read about as we approach our 1st Birthday, so make sure you come and say hello!

The Fayre is a charity event and all funds raised will be donated to local charity Compton Hospice. Opening the Fayre will be special guest, Councillor Malcolm Gwinnett who was elected Mayor of Wolverhampton in May this year.

Following a hugely successful event last year even more activities have been added for 2010, these include; music from Wolf radio 107.7 DJ Dicky Dodd, dancing, live music, refreshments, face painting, raffles, bouncy castles, a bucking bronco, choir performances, as well as a variety of stalls and competitions. Clothes charity BCR will also be collecting any unwanted clothing.

Wednesfield High are holding an adult 5-a-side football tournament – entry costs £20 per team and all proceeds will go to Compton Hospice. Energy company E.ON are partnered with Wednesfield High supporting event and providing the trophy for the winning team.

Matt Smallwood, Director of Engineering and Project Manager, said: “The Fayre is a great community event that celebrates all that is positive in the local area and everyone is welcome.”

Anyone interested in entering a team for the tournament should contact Matt Smallwood on 01902 558574 or email msmallwood@wolverhamptoncyp.org.uk.

St Thomas’ Church on the High Street is holding it’s Spring Fayre this Saturday,  10am – 12 noon, Stalls will include cakes, books, music, jewellery, bric-a-brac, groceries, the human fruit machine and more. Everyone is welcome!

If you  attend the Fayre don’t forget to post your pictures to our Flickr Pool or to our Facebook page for everyone to see – if you don’t know how to use Flickr see our guide here.

St Thomas can now also be found on Facebook.

WV11.co.uk would like to thank all of our readers and contributors and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading about local news and events since we launched the site in August as much as we’ve enjoyed writing about them. We’ll be back in the new year with more updates and you should begin to see posters and flyers publicising the site popping up in and around Wednesfield.

And remember, if you have any news or events you’d like us to cover you can drop us an email or call/text us on 07855 409 319.

Photo by Steph Jennings.

A review of last night’s concert at St Thomas’s Church in Wednesfield starring the Ashmore Park Choir, another full house with just under £1000 pounds raised for the Christian Aid charity.

Once more Terry Green as the Musical Director has put together another wonderful Christmas show, along with Ros Green as the accompanist and John Billau as assistant conductor. Some traditional and not so traditional carols and the now legendary extra acts to accompany these, The Cornopean Brass Ensemble with Gillian Edwards had its now traditional part to play with six great pieces played in the two halves, the witty readings by Geraldine Blanchette were funny, Denis Billau’s rendition of “Fields of Athenry” was excellent, Lizzie Watson our own Nick the Vic’s daughter was wonderful in her flute solo of  ”The Dance Of The Snowmen” and Clive Williams’s Dylan Thomas reading was lovely.

As always, Irene Dodd who Terry calls “The Bard of Wednesfield” gave a wonderful monologue this time on how the Angel got on top of the Tree in her usual Yorkshire style and received a very mighty round of applause. I must say that the soloist singers, Rita Williams, Sue Ridgeway and Steve Robtham were a credit to the choir and made the entire evening a joy, with the congregation all being able to take part in some of the carols made it a wonderful evening and one many people look forward to every Christmas.

And finally, the choir sang a lovely new Christmas Carol which was written by Terry Green himself, hopefully we will hear more of his own carols next year.

Thanks to Viv for this great article! If you’d like to write for WV11, please get in touch.

This means you don’t need type in your name and email address to post a comment on an article – just click on the Facebook or Twitter button next to the comments form and follow the simple on-screen instructions.

(If you don’t have an account with either site, just fill in your name and email address below).

Choose which method you want to use to comment:

After clicking on the Facebook button you will see this page – if you’re not already logged into Facebook enter your details and click ‘login’ to authorise your Facebook account.

After clicking on the Twitter button you will see this page, if you’re not already logged into Twitter, enter your details and click ‘allow’ to authorise your Twitter account.

Once you’ve done this you will be able to post comments on all of the articles on WV11 and you’ll stay logged in to the site as long as you’re logged in to Facebook or Twitter.

Why not try it by commenting on this article? If you have any problems, email us for help!

We’ve had some lovely comments and some very useful feedback left.

Over the weekend we received this message from Gina;

“What about a “we want to sell section”. At least you know you won’t have to travel far  if there is something of interest. I’m sick of ringing an advert in the  paper and finding out it’s in Dudley or miles away. At least this way, no one will  have to travel more than a few miles. Just a suggestion anyway…”

We said if you had any suggestions to let us know and we’d see what we could do about implementing them, so true to our word we have. If you now click on the community page, you will see our forum and there you will find a brand new category.

WV11 Classified.

Now you can advertise things you’d like to sell, or if you are in the market to buy, free of charge and know that it’s coming from somewhere reasonably local.

There are some rules to follow, which are posted at the end of this article, about advertising on the site, because well we don’t fancy a free for all, but essentially it will be up to our community members to manage themselves.

So go ahead and take a look, and if you pick up a bargain thank Gina.

RULES

• If we suspect an advertisement is for illegal goods we will remove that article from the forum immediately, If the same item is then reposted with out contact with WV11 admin to verify that this is a legitimate listing the user will be blocked.

• All ads placed must be by an individual, for traders and businesses looking to to advertise with us please see HERE.

• It is the members responsibility to verify advertisements are correct, WV11 takes NO responsibility for ads placed and acts as a means of communication only.

]]> http://www.wv11.co.uk/2009/08/26/feedback/feed/ 3 http://www.wv11.co.uk/2009/08/16/and-were-live/ http://www.wv11.co.uk/2009/08/16/and-were-live/#comments Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:48:29 +0000 James http://www.wv11.co.uk/?p=280 Hello and welcome to WV11.co.uk!

We’ve been working hard for the last month or so to get the site up and running, and we’re very pleased to finally be ‘live’. We’ve even made the front page of a Google search without trying!

This post will hopefully highlight several features of the site, and will help to show you how to find information within the site. We’d love to hear what you think about the site, so feel free to drop us an email.

Categories

All the news articles we post at WV11 are categorised which means you can search articles by category, or by sub-category. To browse the news categories, just move your mouse over the categories below the banner at the top of the page and click on one to display all of the posts in this category:

Different ways of getting WV11 updates

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for you to get WV11 updates in a way which suits you:

• Email Updates: Subscribe here and you’ll receive a daily digest of any articles we post – if we don’t post anything, you won’t receive an email.
• Facebook: Become a ‘fan’ of WV11 on our Facebook Page and you’ll see our posts appear in your Facebook news feed.
• Twitter: New posts are automatically sent to our Twitter stream where our followers can comment and chat with us.
• RSS: Subscribe to our RSS feed in your reader.

Pages and Search

As well as the news posts on the front page of the site, we also have several pages with extra content – take a look at the ‘pages’ section of the sidebar to find out more..

Don’t forget you can use the search function to find anything on the site (it works just like Google), and you can also browse older news articles in the archives.

Resources

One of the most useful pages of the site is the Resources page. Here you’ll find a long list of local resources and contacts. If you think we’ve missed anything, let us know.

Community/ Forum

Whilst it’s very easy to comment on our news articles, we decided that if (like us) you enjoying talking, a community/forum might be a good idea. Register here and get talking with other WV11 residents.

You can contact us with news or information about any story or event you’d like us to cover, and if you’d like to go one step further and actually contribute to the site by writing an article yourself, drop us an email to discuss your idea and we’ll most likely welcome you with open arms!

One of our aims in setting up WV11 is to give the local community a voice online as we don’t feel the local press really does this. We are tired of reading negative articles that only focus on what’s wrong with our community, and whilst we’re not aiming to sweep problems under the rug, we are trying to focus on the positive aspects of life in Wednesfield.

(If for some reason you’d like to contact us anonymously you can do so by entering a fake name and email address into our contact form to protect your anonymity.)