Hi Ady
One Cannot help but notice all of the Facebook posts on the home page. The thing with all of them is that they are all one sided. No debate is entered into. No banter. No life to the club website. Do not get me wrong, I am not anti FB, I have a profile myself but there is a time and a place and I can see that in the very near future there will be no club website. At present it is used a fraction of what it was last year and the reason is the one sided traffic from FB. Recent comments by Jimmy about Italy and Woody about the Tour would, in the past, have bought a response. In the past the briefest of blogs or posts about a clubrun would have elicited some replies, not it is just a feed from FB. Now it is just one sided and so from an outsiders point of view, looking at this website, this is not an active club (not in the way it was).
Perhaps this doesn't matter? My suggestion (and I know it won't be liked) is that, temporarily at least, the FB feed is removed to try to get people back on to the site.
Just putting it out there. ....

Hi John,

Hits to our site have only increased due to the Facebook feeds. Click-through activity to our site from Facebook has also increased since we extended the Facebook group. The site gets more traffic to read blogs and check calendar feeds than ever. The site is the only place where blogs and calendar information is available.

In terms of the feed, I am trialling various plugins at the moment to get a better layout to the feed on the page, to include responses.

What you may have missed above, in my previous post, was the statement that the club web site will continue to be the main site, with all other social media feeds still being fed into it.
Blogs are read only, and not open to comments on the site itself. This is designed to keep the site clean, with blogs easy to find etc.
If the Facebook feed is removed, then I would bet that hit rate would go down rather than up.

Alongside this, those who wish to can subscribe to site notifications of blogs, so will always be informed when new stuff is posted. Equally, the calendar can also be subscribed to by those who use Outlook on a PC (or other compliant email program), or Calendar is OS X on Mac, or Calendar on iOS on iPhone, iPad, or Google Calendar on Android. This means that your calendar updates every time that the site does when you subscribe. The site is therefore very much alive.
I can do all sorts of things to the club web site, but I can't force users to only use the forum for example. People who wish to use social media will do so. Those who wish to use Facebook will do so.

I won't be making rapid changes to the site, as there is a lot of stuff on there that I need to carefully manage to make sure all components keep on working (the gallery for example is broken due to the software company decision to drop support for Flash. This will take a while to carefully disassemble and then repair). Similarly, updating the site and plugins requires careful management. I certainly don't want to put the site out of action due to making sweeping changes.

In respect of not being an active club. Look at the calendar. 2 club runs every week, 2 training rides every week, TT every week, beginners rides now being held, 3 TLI races in June, an open 25 mile TT in August. I think we're pretty busy.

In saying all of this, I'm more than happy to receive suggestions from any club member as to how we might add to the web site (send me examples of other sites that you like and let me know why you think they work). I create and maintain the site for the club, so feedback is welcome. I would suggest that this feedback is kept positive though (as per the above, show me sites that give better information, and I'll take a look).

In a similar vein - the club as a whole is run by a handful of eager volunteers, so this is an open invitation to club members to contribute to the running of the club. If you have a blog to write, let me know - I'll give you author access to the site, and you can contribute as you see fit (within reason of course - as it isn't a platform for personal pontification! That can stay on Facebook!)

Just posted my latest "plea" for kit orders on both Facebook and the forum, and it suddenly stuck me, club clothing order requests must me the most inactive subject on both forums 🙄 and rarely gets read, let alone debated upon.

Therefore i have come to the conclusion that "debate" is all in the topic and not location it is posted! 😆

So hopefully by also writing this post here, where the has been much interest over the last few weeks, it may encourage some of you to actually read my post in clothing, even if you dont order anything 😆

Hi Jim,

I'll let you into a secret .... I did see your post on that Facebook thingy about clothing order for Winter kit! 😮 😮 😮 Were you referring to the Winter order for 2015 or 2016? 😆 😆 😆 😆

Sorry but couldn't resist that one. Just keeping my fingers crossed that the new supplier has plenty of fire extinguishers. Keep up the good work Jim (furiously back-pedalling). 😳

Ta

Dave

P.S. Caroline asked what is happening about skin suits as the Giordana order was cancelled so are we raising a new order with the new supplier? If so can they do ladies fit as Giordana struggled with this request?

Yes Dave, I will be pacing the order with bioracer and I can order the amount I need and won't be left with 6. And yes, they do ladies fit, so hopefully I can get something off them to assist with sizing when we have the sizing evening.