Shepton and the local area are wonderful places, with lots going on and some great folk who live here, but perhaps we don't always celebrate that as much as we once did, and many people feel we need to find the heart of our community again, that somehow we mislaid it for a while, but there are now a number of helpful initiatives, much goodwill, and great optimism for the changes taking place locally: a real sense of coming out of the doldrums.

This site is intended to be of help in that process by allowing us to hold up an electronic mirror for ourselves, reminding us all who we are.

Every local voluntary body, non-profit organisation and school will be offered not only free space but also some helpful, easy to use tools to publish to the site themselves and to keep that content updated.

 

We are working to encourage tuition in Web related skills by existing educational bodies and, on a more ad hoc basis, by working professionals. We will also help with tuition ourselves as much as we can, though our primary task is to develop the infrastructure.

There will be one or more diaries for the town, to which it will be easy to add events, and we will give groups and individuals the ability to publish their own material, which may include still and moving images as well as audio, and we hope this will synergise with other proposed local projects.

Businesses will be listed free and also have the opportunity to purchase low-priced 'enhanced pages' with generous space to publicise themselves, thus helping to support the site financially, or they may have their own complete website - which will include the ability to publish their own news directly to Shepton Life as well as to their own site.

A lot of time and skill goes in to creating a bespoke site, so they will never be free, but our intention is specifically to help the Web come of age locally, and part of that is making it more affordable, so we will be offering for hundreds of pounds dynamic sites which can be updated easily by their owners, and with the same or greater functionality and attractiveness than sites that have previously cost thousands.

We are skilled and experienced in enabling e-commerce and will provide easy, economical solutions for those who wish to sell on the Web. This alone has the potential to generate substantial local revenue.

This has to be a collaborative project to work. If it is used as it could be, what we create together here can quickly become a very dynamic presentation of who we are, which, because of the genuine cross-linking it will produce, will give us a huge communal presence in the search engines, and will be very attractive to potential employers and visitors alike.

We will not be the authors of the site or dictate the course it takes: the content is to be created by all of us who use it, and our job, the Shepton Life team, as Web professionals, is simply to provide the tools to make that possible and for it to be as easy as sending an email.

Some people like learning how technology works, but most just want what it does!

The Web has always thrived on collaboration and co-operation; it was developed as a medium simply for exchanging information, and Shepton Life will not be in competition with any other local site, of which we have a number of highly competent and attractive ones, but is designed specifically to complement them and bring them visitors: different sites have different purposes and styles.

We hope this is, at least, a partial answer to the question which some may ask, "What do we need another website for!" :-) No matter how benevolent or expert, or how interactive and sophisticated they are, sites provided for people are not the same as those created by them; they are simply different creatures.

So, while as individuals, we do not have any more of a mandate than others to present this area on the Web, the people who live here do, and that is what this can be: a community saying to the world and to itself, for itself, "This is who we are."

Our modern media, particularly TV, have had an alienating influence because they have been usurped by big business and we have become, in the main, passive consumers of what they feed us.

The Web is different: we can control the content, producing it ourselves, and we can use it responsibly, not driven by profit or political motive, to help shape our lives and those of our children in far more creative and wholesome ways than recently.

Put simply: there is an opportunity for us to tell the truth to one another, and help us come together again.

The technical term for this type of site is 'C³MS' - a Collaborative Community Content Managed Site - which is a long-winded way of saying it is something the whole community can create together in structured way. It runs in PHP, an open source scripting language used on over 30% of sites, together with MySQL, the world's most popular open source database. Both are exceptionally well supported by a huge community of users all over the planet.

 

If jargon doesn't put you off, we use a system of 'hierarchical permissions', which partly obviates the need for supervision of submitted content, to make it possible for everybody to take part, no matter what their level of experience, yet still to produce a coherent and pleasing result.

 

There is quite a lot of existing software, much of it 'open source', which enables cyber communities, but the primary coding on which this site runs is not adapted from something designed for a different purpose; it has been written in Shepton for Shepton - though naturally we will not reinvent the wheel and will use external modules if they are fit for purpose.

 

But the main advantage of the applications being written specifically for this site is that we can continue to evolve and grow it in the direction we want to as a community, without the sorts of complications that come from trying to be all things to all people, which often produce sites unintuitive and difficult to use.

 

Please don't be misled by the fact that we are deliberately starting very simply, and will 'bolt on' the various components and features as the site grows; there is very considerable complexity and sophistication under the surface, the result of decades of experience, which makes the simplicity possible. It also gives the possiblity for literally exponential growth as, and when, the idea catches hold and people make it their own.

 

 

 

If there is anything your or your organisation would particularly like us to provide or develop, please let us know. Even better, if you are interested and experienced in working on the Web, do please contact us.

Click here to go to our contact page to send us an email.