Day 2 of building the Directory

It's half 12 midday as I write this and it's just passed the 24 hour mark of building the directory! 

The main things we have achieved are back of house coding that you won't necessarily see, but it does make the website actually function! So far, there's been no major hiccups and I "think" we've got the bones in place to start adding listings and events. 

I've put out a call for submissions on the Aylesbury Facebook Page and they are rolling in already. The feedback that I'm getting immediately is that events are finding it really hard to market themselves and that this has the potential to be a really helpful tool for signposting people to their events. That's really encouraging! 

I've also had a few submissions from the contact form, so phew that's working as well. It take me about 5 minutes per listing to add, researching the group, finding their website or Facebook page, downloading and resizing images and getting an embedded google maps location for people to find the location quickly. It's very admin heavy! But I'll get quicker with each one I add. 

In terms of researching myself - oh my goodness. There is so much duff information. Out of date or completely shut down groups, bad links, sites that claim to have a directory and then absolutely no way of searching through it. It's a hard slog. However on the positive, I'm finding so many unusual things that I had absolutely no idea existed! 

My Highlight of the day is the Weston Turville Historical Society. Founded in 1999, just one year after I moved to Aylesbury at a wee child, they meet for part of the year and give talks on the history of the area. This is right up my alley and I had no idea it existed. That is what this directory really aims to solve. You can find the link to our listing here Weston Turville Historical Society - Bucks Craft Directory

At the time of writing we have 35 listings covering clubs, courses, independent shops, community cafes and more and 6 events. I think that's a really good achievement for one person with a foot literally in pieces on their sofa! If I can keep up the pace, by the end of the week I'll have over a hundred listings and then I will feel like it's already becoming a useful resource.

It just shows what you can do when you're enthusiastic about a subject. I also have a pile of roughly 35 dishes that need washing and by the end of the week that will probably overwhelm the house. I am not enthusiastic about dish washing...

I NEED your help to add as much as I can to the Directory so that it can flourish and be useful to users and organisers. Keep on sending me listing suggestions!

Warmest Wishes
Freya