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The New Site
Thu, 23/10/2008 - 19:08
This is the new look Mysterious Britain & Ireland, a far cry from our original html based, but highly popular website, which has had been online for over eight years. What do you think of this new site? We're not after praise....though it might be nice. What I am really interested in is what do you want from this website? A Blog? Book Reviews? Website Reviews? Interviews? Discussion Areas? Opinion Polls? Video footage of sites? What type of articles etc etc. We can't promise anything but all suggestions will be thoroughly considered.
Essentially we are compiling a large database concerning hauntings, legends, folklore, UFO's, ancient sites etc and this is only useful if the users can interrogate it in such a way that they get the maximum benefit. One way I thought of trying this was to introduce maps for each topic, therefore if you wanted to see how the screaming skulls or giant legends are distributed around the country, there could be a map.
This could be quite useful. It would probably show most Green Ladies are found in Scotland. But what about Mermaids? Are they mostly on the West Coast and if so, why? Same with Black Dogs and Road Ghosts. It could be there is no pattern, where for others there could be a cultural or reason behind it.
Maps like these can be pulled together from the data we have and the more we obtain the bigger picture we will see. So if you know of anything in your local area that we haven't covered, please let us know about it.
GIS software could be useful for this. I'm not too up on GIS though so could be wrong.
Theres possibly one thing that could be added, when you are looking at the forum pages there is a "you are here" bit at the top of the page, can one be added at the bottom too ? The reason is, if you have a long string of postings you have to back to the top to click back in to the previous page, obviously a person can click the back arrow but this makes the thread look unread.
That's a good point, Lee. I'll look into doing that tomorrow. I'd been meaning to look at the You Are Here breadcrumb at some point.. The forum one is good but, the one appearing on top of articles doesn't always work logically, at least from a human point of view.
Why not have a few blogs each wrote by people with differant interests and points of view?
Blogs could work, but due to the nature of the subjects on the site would probably be more suited to specific site visits, tours or investigations. As some of the subjects would be difficult to blog - any suggestions welcome however.
I think a few small infrequent blogs on differant subjects would be a good idea, each written by someone passionate about that topic. Any volunteers?
An investigator's blog would make interesting reading. Though care would have to be taken to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the site being investigated was protected.
In theory we could do podcasts as well :).
I am really impressed with the new site, but the new forum is taking some getting used to. If you can put up podcasts then I take it you could host music. I'm not really into folklore that much but I suppose you could relevant folk tunes and the stories behind them. Just a thought.