Here at WV11.co.uk we’ve had a pretty good weekend. Around 10 days ago we received a call from 107.7 The Wolf telling us that we had won a Pride of Wolverhampton award!

According to The Wolf’s website, the awards are “a chance to showcase all that is good about the people of Wolverhampton” and we were thrilled to not only have been nominated by members of the community, but to have won an award.

Awards Ceremony

On Saturday night we attended the awards ceremony sponsored by 107.7 The Wolf and the Mander Centre where we were given the ‘entrepreneur of the year’ award (sponsored by Acorn to Oak financial services) for our ‘business minded, good idea that’s raised funds’. Whilst we pointed out that this website is non-profit and run on a voluntary basis, The Wolf wanted the help we’d given to local residents and businesses alike to be recognised and decided to give us this award, something we’re over the moon about!

The black tie awards ceremony at the Molinuex made for a great evening and featured a live performance by X-Factor winner Matt Cardle who performed 3 songs before signing autographs and posing for photos.

Amongst the 15 awards given out another two went to Wednesfield residents;  Vicky Ball from Wednesfield High won ‘teacher of the year’ and 9 year-old Oak Meadow student Tia Small won ‘child of courage’.

We’d like to say a massive thanks to everyone who nominated us,  to The Wolf and the Mander Centre for putting on such a great event and to all the WV11 readers who visit the website and our Facebook/Twitter pages.

And finally, we’d like to say congratulations to all of the winners – there were some really inspirational people at the event and we were honoured to be among them!

In an attempt to try and cover events happening in and around Wednesfield and to make it easier for our readers to keep track of what’s happening, we have launched an events page.

Head over to www.wv11.co.uk/events where you’ll find dates PACT meetings, as well as other local events.

If you have an event in the WV11 area that you’d like us to publicise, please email info@wv11.co.uk with details and we’ll do our best to add your event to the page.

The events page allows users of calendars such as Google Calendar, iCal and Microsoft Outlook to subscribe to the calendar, simply click on the ‘subscribe’ buttons at the bottom of the events page.

As 2010 draws to a close we’re pleased to be able to launch a FREE WV11.co.uk mobile app for both iPhone, iPod Touch and Android users.

You can now access all the latest WV11.co.uk news and information via our free app, which also includes photos, videos, jobs in WV11, links to our Facebook and Twitter pages and the ability to send news stories to us.

To download the free WV11 mobile app for your iPhone, iPod or Android device, please visit our mobile apps page.

We’d like to wish all of our visitors a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Thank you so much for all of your support and feedback over the last twelve months – WV11.co.uk couldn’t have been a success it weren’t for our visitors who contribute towards the site in numerous ways – so thank you very much!

We’ll see you in 2011!

Whilst we don’t normally choose to shout about our achievements, we thought this one was worth sharing…after all it’s not every day you end up on the BBC, is it?

We were recently approached by Nick Booth of Podnosh who asked if he could interview us about why we decided to set up Wv11 and how it was going.

The interview is now available on Nick Booth’s BBC Blog.

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.

WV11 remains a not-for-loss project (we don’t make money from it, but we’re trying not to lose money), and whilst we won’t make much money selling ads every little bit helps us to cover our running costs (web-hosting) and the time we put into researching and writing news stories. From time to time we will also donate money to local charity events.

We are using the Addiply advertising platform which businesses can register with to display ads on the site – it’s really simple to sign up and you can choose between text or image based ads.

As this is something of an experiment we have decided to start by charging £5 per month for ads, which we think is pretty reasonable? (Visitor stats are available on request.)

If you’d like to advertise on WV11, you can buy ad space here or email / phone us on 07855 409 319 if you have any questions. Ad slots are available to local businesses and organisations within the Wolverhampton area, however we will prioritise WV11 based organisations.

We hope this service will be a great opportunity for local businesses to advertise to local people, so if you’re interested get in touch!

The article (on pg 15) covers our work with local voluntary group, the Wednesfield Area Action Network (WAAN).

Click here to download the magazine in PDF format.

In the coming days we’ll be launching our first ever competition, giving you the chance to get your hands on a limited edition 2010 calendar featuring 24 fascinating historic photos of Wednesfield, courtesy of WAAN and the Wolverhampton Archives.

Stay tuned for more info…

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.