It's been a while...

so let me update you!

Ian Alderman

Nov 25, 2023 — 5 min read

The new homepage... it's a work in progress.

Hey, it's Ian and it's great to be talking to you again. I know it's been a while since our last newsletter. A lot has happened, so I will try to do my best to bring you up to date.

The lack of posts on the website has not meant we haven't been working hard behind the scenes, writing and developing it for all of us.

The first obvious thing we have done is update the website theme to make it look better. Not particularly important I know, but it is very important for things like security, accessibility and searchability. We hope you like it and if you have any suggestions please let me know!

Boring, but necessary!

The first and most important area of the website that's been missing, are some pages explaining how the site works and giving you all the information regarding privacy concerns, cookies, copyright and a whole host of other things. These pages might not look much, but they have taken me hours to write concisely without all the jargon!

Another page that I have written is a welcome page that explains how to use the website and how it's structured. I don't think I need to talk too much about it. The best thing is to have a look and tell me what you think or if I have missed anything!

Charity Adventure 2023

I have also restructured our Charity Adventure 2023 which we have been linking to as the first item on the website for a while. Please feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.

I have also tweaked our About Us page to keep some consistency but it feels slightly narcissistic talking about that. If you are interested here's the link

Website structure (tags & newsletters)

This will require a little explanation, but we hope it will be an improvement for everybody. If you have already looked at our new Welcome page you will have a good idea about what it is. But if you haven't, we have now introduced three different sections to the website; Notes, Chats and Articles & Journals. You can also subscribe to them separately as newsletters.

Notes are our version of social media based on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube combined.
Chats used to be our "Newsletter - newsletter" (more on that below in 'An explanation'). Think traditional letters and penpals combined but with a whole lot more.
Articles and journals include things like our daily trail journals and traditional blog-style posts. We have combined all Adventures, Outdoors, Autism, Education and Lifestyle posts into one newsletter subscription.

You can check (and update) your newsletter subscriptions in your account. Simply click on the button below and then click on 'manage' next to Emails where you will find your subscriptions.

Review Your Email Subscriptions

An explanation

We had a few issues, but the main one was with people getting confused with the names of things and consequently "how the site works".

The website is made up of pages and posts. Any static content such as the Contact page is a page. Everything that we 'publish' is a post, and when a post gets delivered to your inbox it's called a newsletter. Posts make up over 99% of the content of the website.

When I first set up the website, I created a newsletter that you could subscribe to as a newsletter. I created a "newsletter newsletter" and it was this that created some issues and confused some people.

As a consequence, we had to change what we named things. It was this process that got me thinking about restructuring the site to make it more manageable and to reflect what we wanted it to be able to do all along.

We have been here before however trying to find a system and routine that works for us, that doesn't rely on social media platforms.

I always intended to use this website as our default platform to publish any content and suppliment it with social media. This has never changed and remains my primary focus.

I have never hid my dislike of social media platforms. With their ease of use and accessibility, I, unfortunately, fell back into the rut of just posting nightly on Facebook and watching it disappear into the abyss within a few hours. This I regret as I find it very disheartening and not very motivational. I never wanted, nor did I intend Facebook or any other social media platform to be the main way that we connect with people or publish... but more on that in another post!

The website will always need to evolve, and with my obsessive and perfectionist personality, it will never be finished as I try to find ways to make it better and improve it...