Town / Villiage Websites

Itsdacraic

Hi,

I'm considering pulling together a website for a town (community news, tourist info, business directory etc).

Just wondering if any of you could recommend some existing town or village sites for inspiration?

I really like the design of tralee.ie but looking for a few more.

Thanks

smcelhinney

My god.

Is that ACTUALLY a scrolling ticker?

What year is this?

jmcc

Actually Tralee.ie is not a bad little site if you ignore the banner scrolling away at the top. It is a bit Wordpress/Joomla though.

I was looking at www.carrickonsuir.info a few days ago and it seemed to be a good effort though one or two of the pages made Firebug act a bit strange.

It is important to get the .ie and the .com of your proposed site.

Regards...jmcc

Itsdacraic

jmcc wrote: »

Actually Tralee.ie is not a bad little site if you ignore the banner scrolling away at the top. It is a bit Wordpress/Joomla though.

I was looking at www.carrickonsuir.info a few days ago and it seemed to be a good effort though one or two of the pages made Firebug act a bit strange.

It is important to get the .ie and the .com of your proposed site.

Regards...jmcc

I was looking into the .ie and it would seem that the county council have registered all the .ie town names.

I wouldn't be overly gone on the Carrick site, cheers to the suggestion though.

jmcc

Itsdacraic wrote: »

I was looking into the .ie and it would seem that the county council have registered all the .ie town names.

Town and city names are reserved for councils only.

I wouldn't be overly gone on the Carrick site, cheers to the suggestion though.

It really depends on what you want to do with the site. Most of the sites I've seen are ordinary Wordpress/Joomla type sites. I've been working on a revamp of one for Waterford but it is just static pages (handrolled HTML/CSS) and a search engine with over 100K Waterford related webpages and websites. Genuine local content is the key to a good local site.

Regards...jmcc

smash

http://www.sandyford.com/ has been around for a few years. With lots of third party plugins.

http://www.bray.ie/ seems to be kept updated fairly well.

VINCWM

http://www.headford.org/ looks good!

gentcore

I dont understand how we are such a talented country of people yet the local county sites are such ****

How much do they pay and who do they hire to design them?

Tralee.ie starts out nice until you get this godawful parallax scrolling background change emulated effect and the whole ux is a convoluted mess

jmcc

gentcore wrote: »

I dont understand how we are such a talented country of people yet the local county sites are such ****

How much do they pay and who do they hire to design them?

The official sites are often open to tender or else designed by local government people. Other than that the fall into three categories: advertising;community orientated; professional.

The first type, advertising sites are typically developed by small web development firms trying to get customers.

The second, community orientated, are often small grounds of people getting together to do a website for their local community. This type of site is rarer now as Facebook has overtaken it in ease of use. It is easier just to set up a group on Facebook had have people in the locality join.

The third type, professional, are the ones that are developed to make money. They are rare on a village level and more common on a large town or city level. They will actively sell advertising to businesses in the area. However it is a very tough business and the operational lifetime of new entrants is probably around two years. Their survival is a function of the number of people in their target area, the number of businesses advertising and the level of usage. They are, for the most part, better designed than the other two.

Tralee.ie starts out nice until you get this godawful parallax scrolling background change emulated effect and the whole ux is a convoluted mess

Quick question: are you a web developer or the target market?

Regards...jmcc

p

At this point, while a website s important, it's less important than other channels. A goof Facebook & Twitter page is easier to update and less resource intensive than a website, so bear that in mind.