| About the Bathford Village Website |
When ? Why ? By Whom ?
The Bathford Village Website has existed in various forms since 1995.
That is quite a long time for a village website, as observed in an article by
Liz Whitefield in the Bath Chronicle. In those days, the World Wide Web was
still quite new - its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee had created the first World
Wide Web pages for display across the Internet only on Christmas Day 1990.
Note: try not to confuse the Internet with the World Wide Web
- the latter is a mechanism for displaying and linking "pages" from any
computer, using the "network of networks" known as the Internet. The Internet
was created by USA military research organisations during the late 1960s and
early 1970s.
The Bathford Village Website was created by Kenneth Spencer, who runs
KA Spencer (Software), which is a small IT Consultancy and Software House
within the village.
The website was created as an information resource not only for those within and
near the village of Bathford, but also to allow those with relatives or friends
in far-flung places to see what is going on in the village, and for prospective
visitors and desktop travellers to learn about the village.
The entire website of KA Spencer (Software) receives between 6,000 and 9,000
hits per month, of which 1,000-2,000 are related to the Bathford Village pages.
The website visitors are from virtually every country, being not just Bathford
residents.
Visitors may enter the website directly, because they know of it or have been
told of it.
However, many encounter the website after searching Google, or a similar search
engine, for an amazingly wide variety of information.
Examples of searches include: "where is Admiral Lord Nelson buried ?" (actually
it is his sister who is buried in St Swithun's not the Admiral himself, but
Google is trying to be helpful!); "where was the first railway built ?" (Google
has noted our entries about the Bathford Railway bridge); " ... Moses Pickwick
..." (a further reference by Google to the names of those buried at St Swithuns!).
The original village website consisted of a few pages created as an extension of his own business website, and was developed over about eight years to include an archive of the Bathford Bulletin, Village Organisations Pages, and an Events page.
The new Bathford Village Website is very much based on
the original concept. The site now sits in its own Internet Domain and is
thus separately identified from the original KA Spencer (Software) site.
It has been
enhanced to include a Bathford Business Page, and additional photographs of
locations around the village. More enhancements are planned for the future.
The site continues to be owned, developed, managed, hosted and paid for by KA
Spencer (Software) as a service to the village of Bathford.
If there are developments which you would like to see, or if you
have any comments, please send them by email to:
webmaster@bathford.org.uk.
Many thanks for visiting the site - I hope you found it useful and interesting.
Kenneth Spencer
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