The objective
Love Coggeshall is a new website that aims to act as an online directory for businesses, community groups, events and activities. It is open to Coggeshall but also the surrounding areas. The aim is to bring all of this information into one place, so people have an easy way of finding a local business, or looking for a new group they might want to get involved in.
Supporting the community
We have been in Coggeshall for nearly four years. In that time, some of our team have got more involved in the community and we realised there are some challenges that the village is facing. These aren’t exclusive to Coggeshall but are being experienced by many rural villages and towns around the country – the conversion of shops to residential homes, overdevelopment and a lack of investment.
While we can’t help with many of these issues, we decided to set up a website to try and do our bit to help. The vision for this website was to find a way to support businesses, community groups and share general information about what is going on. Social media is a great way to post and share things, it can create a bit of noise and you often can’t find what you are actually looking for. Or you have to spend a lot of time scrolling!
Yes, it really is free
We hope this will be a website that enables any business to list who they are and what they do, potentially helping to increase the number of customers they have and improve their SEO. Additionally, as new people move in to Coggeshall, it can be difficult to find out what there is to do. With community listings, it is possible to search and see what there is that suits your interests. If it is one-off events you are looking for, hopefully again you can find something listed.
This website will never look to make a profit – we don’t want to charge people when we are simply trying to help. We do ask for donations, but those are just to allow us to keep maintaining this website. It does have a limited number of advert spots that can be purchased, but otherwise, we hope people will actively list their business, group, event or activity and will find the website useful without having to pay anything.
A long-term commitment
This is a project that we plan on committing to for the long-term. Following the response it received when it went live we immediately began planning more phases of new features. Clearly there is a need for this, so we plan on making sure it keeps supporting those who need it.