All About This Web Site

This web site is a hobby, and quite a time-consuming one. I do it just for fun in my spare time.  Much of the information however does come from the monthly village newsletter, for which I'm extremely grateful, and from family researchers and other historians who make contact. 

I endeavour to keep the information as up-to-date as possible but I welcome any help in doing this. So if you have found something here which is inaccurate or a link which doesn't work - please do let me know by emailing me:

Similarly, if you feel I've left something out, or you have additional information about the village past or present, I'd be glad to know about it.

You may have reached this page because you are thinking about doing something similar yourself.  In which case here's some information you might find useful:  

• I use Frontpage 2000
  
  

• The site is now  hosted by Easily.co.uk, a company I've used for several years for other site. Easily offers very good value and an excellent interface which even I can understand.  I moved after many years with another host because of unjustified and constantly rising prices. 
  
  

• The guestbook used to be an automatic service, but the hosts proved impossible at keeping out spammers, so reluctantly I abandoned it.  I now do the job manually.
  
  

• Bow Brickhill features on most search engines.  All submissions were done by hand.   It took about a year to make an impression on the listings, but the site is now deeply embedded in the internet.  If you got here via Angelfire, this is because for the first four years the site was hosted there on freespace and I've set up redirection pages for any links still out there in the ether.  
  
  

• Design of the site - text on the page, alt tags on images, links to and from the site as well as  titles, descriptions, header fonts, file names and meta tags, all play a part in achieving decent placement. Unfortunately there are few places where you can submit for free - so the sooner you start doing it, the more likely you are to win in the visibility stakes.
  
  

• The search facility is courtesy of www.freefind.com.   It's a great  feature and automatically generates a site map and delivers regular reports so that I can see the search strings entered by visitors.   The search page can be tailor-made to reflect the site's overall design.  This is a free service.
  
  

• Google Analytics - another free service - is also operational on this site.  This allows me to see easily how many visitors I've had and also which search terms led them to the site.
  
  

• Spam.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!  Because I created the site before spam robots were in existence it never occurred to me that one day I would regret having my email address so prominently displayed. I now use a nice little piece of script which should stop robot harvesting.  If you want to see it, just go to the genealogy page where it's been used a great deal, and view the source code.  You'll see every time an email address is required, there's code with script tags. 
  
  
  If you're thinking of doing something similar for your community, I can tell you that it's a very worthwhile and rewarding hobby.  All you need is time and inclination. Good luck!

Sue Malleson