Welcome to the NEW Notts News Website
Website re-launch
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disseminate information in one direction - from the committee to the members - information that could be several months out of date by the time it was read.
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 June. In the meantime we will continue to update these 'temporary' web pages to keep you informed of progress.
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 we have published them in a "Hints & Tips" page. 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.
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.
Website Survey - the results so far...
Below is a summary of the Survey results that we have received so far.
Most Popular Website Features
The two most popular proposed features were the Have Your Say page (89%) and a page containing downloadable copies of members' publications - regular issues (87%) as well competition prize-winning issues (93%). Needless to say, we plan to include both of these features in the website to be re-launched later this month.
87% of respondents supported the idea of a feature offering advice on using WP/DTP packages, and 84% were in favour of a page containing critical reviews of books, software, online tutorials, etc.
There was less support for pages offering advice on sub-editing (78%) and articles by local members (76%).
Approximately 74% of respondents thought that the Notts News website should include links to websites associated with member publications and and a similar percentage were willing to have a link to their publication's website.
Newsletter Contents
Support for transcribing website content and putting it in a printed newsletter was more muted: 80% thought that it would be useful to include a summary of the Have Your Say replies in a printed newsletter; 76% were in favour of including advice on using WP/DTP packages and advice on sub-editing; and 69% wanted critical reviews of books, software, online tutorials, etc.
Contributions
Since it is crucial that much of the content of the re-launched website will be generated by Notts News members, it was important to gauge how many respondents would be willing to contribute to the proposed features. An encouraging 80% would be willing for their publication to feature on a page containing downloadable copies of members' publications, and 75% would be willing to contribute to the Advice pages and respond to the Have Your Say feature.
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.
