Welcome to the NEW Notts News Website
Notts News (or, more formally, The Association of Nottinghamshire Newsletters) was set up to promote the interests of village, church and community newsletters in Nottinghamshire, offer a forum for discussion and training related to their publication process and to provide guidance and advice to their publishing teams. It now has over 130 members.
Previously, Notts News used meetings and a printed newsletter (The Editor’s Column) as its main channels of communication with its members. But Nottinghamshire is a wide geographical area, so meetings often involved a large amount of travel for many of the attendees. Also, by its nature, a printed newsletter can only effectively disseminate information in one direction - from the committee to the members - information that could be several months out of date by the time it was read.
Word Hints & Tips
In our work, and as editors of a community magazine, we have used Microsoft Word extensively for some time, so we know many of its little quirks. We have gathered together a number of these that we think you might find useful and will publish them on the website in a "Hints & Tips" page over the next few days. Click here for details.
Newsletter Competition 2008
The closing date for entries for this years Newsletter Competition has now passed and the sample newsletters have been passed to the judges. The winners will be announced at the AGM on 10th September 2008.
Click here for more information.
Website re-launch
This is an exciting time for the Association as we've decided that the Notts News website should have a complete makeover. Not just a change of appearance, but also a change to the way that it provides information, advice and support to a fragmented amateur publishing community.
This all came about as a result of a questionnaire we sent to all the contacts on our database last year and a subsequent report that we commissioned into into the effectiveness of Notts News. One of the report's findings was that our website was not perceived as offering many benefits to members. More worryingly, the report concluded that "…one third of the sample [interviewed] has no interest in websites".
We felt it was particularly important that we address this problem, since the internet is a powerful medium for supporting communication between geographically separated individuals that share a common interest (witness the countless other online communities).
We have engaged a professional web designer to create a standards-compliant website underpinned by a Content Management System (CMS) that will provide the flexibility and ease of maintenance to enable the website to grow into a valuable, dynamic resource for busy newsletter editors.
The 'go-ahead' for the new website was given at the meeting on 2nd May and hopefully the new site will be ready by the end of May. In the meantime we will continue to update these 'temporary' web pages to keep you informed of progress.
New Website Survey
From the outset we believe that it's important to give members (and would-be members) of Notts News an opportunity to influence the features on the re-launched website. To this end we've compiled a short online survey which will help us identify those topics that you think would be most useful to you during the production of your newsletter. Your opinions are vital if the New Notts News website is to deliver value to the Notts newsletter community.
So, if you have 10 minutes to spare and would like to participate in our survey, please click here.
We will collate the entries and publish the full findings here by May 8th.
This website (except for the Survey Form) was validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant on 25th February 2008, using the W3C validators, with CSS2 compliance.
