Everything Chester First Blog Post

25th June 2017


Well it has been an extremely busy month. Everything Chester started tweeting in late April and has already gained over 2,500 followers. On Friday 2nd of June the home page of everythingchester.co.uk was coded, the domain name purchased and it was deployed live online in the early hours of the morning. It was a humble beginning, consisting of little more than a welcome message and the embedded twitter feed.

The site hasn’t really been advertised or marketed yet, as it isn’t quite ready for mass consumption. Links have been added to the Everything Chester social media pages, and it has been mentioned in the occasional tweet for those that are curious.

Google analytics has been integrated into the site to monitor Everything Chester’s performance and guide future improvements. As you can see from the images below people all over the word have visited the site, even if they have never step foot in the City of Chester.

Everything Chester Cheshire Blog Analytics

Blog Analytics Everything Chester Cheshire


Little of the sites hits have come from organic traffic / search engine results, but this will soon be changing as everythingchester.co.uk has now been search engine optimised and finally indexed by Google within the last week.

Over the last fortnight the home page has grown and additional pages have been added for Chester News, Chester Pictures, Chester Music, Travelling To Chester, Chester Traffic, Chester Weather, Chester Jobs and now the Everything Chester Blog.

A lot of these pages are the bare bones of what is to come and will be fleshed out substantially in the proceeding weeks. Once these handful of pages are complete focus will shift to new content.

One of the biggest projects, but the one that will ultimately provide the most value to visitors will be the “What’s On In Chester” section. This will an online database of everything that is coming up in the City of Chester, that will be fully searchable and sortable by date, price, category etc.

In reality this will take a while to develop as it won’t just be a static webpage like the current content of Everything Chester, but it will be a dynamic page involving a more complicated programming language. While I have made dynamic pages to generate results from databases before using the Perl programming language, this “What’s On In Chester” project will be written in PHP which I have barely touched.

I have already got the ball rolling by attending the second ever CodeUp Chester meeting in the Storyhouse, Chester's brand new cultural center on Hunter Street. Codeup Chester meet on the third Tuesday of every month and act as a mentoring program for adults who would like to learn how to code for free. I found the whole experience extremely beneficial. I essentially got one-to-one tutoring from a local Chester experienced front end developer. It was really reassuring to discover how similar PHP is to Perl, and got me really excited to crack on with this “What’s On In Chester” side of the project.

Other pages that will be launched soon include Chester attractions, cheap days out in Chester, shopping in Chester, restaurants, Chester hotels and accommodation, Chester history and heritage as well as Chester for romance.

If there is a particular aspect of the City of Chester that you would like to see covered on everythingchester.co.uk just get in touch by email (everything.chester@gmail.com) or fill out the contact form.

We encourage you to submit Chester stories, information, events, photos and welcome any and all feedback and suggested improvements.

Thanks for reading.

Chris.



Everything Chester Contact Form

Search Everything Chester

Flag Counter