Despite Southern Rail, illness, Brexit and Rother, the Rye News team has been working tirelessly to bring you news, reviews, opinions and comments each week.
We must be doing something right as our statistics are on the way up – we now have around 7,500 regular users per month (54% returners and 46% new users), and nearly 700 subscribers. The News and Opinions pages are by far the most popular followed by Living, Culture and What’s On.
Sadly, our small team hasn’t had time to do much PR or marketing so we feel those numbers are very healthy for a new community project run entirely by volunteers. We like what we do and we have great plans for the future but if you like us too, then please help us to take it forward.
How we are developing the site
Behind the scenes there is a lot of work going on to develop the resources offered on the site. Our users are mainly local people which is what we intended but, in partnership with others, we plan to do more to support businesses working in the tourism sector and encourage more visitors to the site as well as doing more to promote local businesses providing services to local people. Our new ideas and services will be launched later this year.
Meanwhile, we have recently added a number of new features to help you make use of Rye News as a free or low cost promotional tool for your business. We hope in turn that we can ask you to help those of us working to develop the site for the benefit of Rye. With your help, we can pay a small amount to local people offering key services.
What’s New – we have replaced the Classified page with “What’s New”. This is for announcements, so if you are opening a new shop, providing a new service, have a meeting you’d like to publicise, or perhaps give more information about an event, then simply select Submit an Announcement. Announcements can last for up to one month.
What’s On – This hasn’t changed. You can still submit your events using the Submit an Event option but if needed you can add more information about an event in the What’s New section.
Buy an advert – you can now place adverts yourself. For September and October we are offering very reasonable prices of £50 for three months for a square advert and £150 for three months for a leaderboard advert. See Submit an Advert or Sponsor for details.
Donate – residents who enjoy reading Rye News might like to make a donation towards the work we are doing. You can pay by PayPal – you don’t need a PayPal account – any major credit card is accepted, or we can provide bank details.
Sponsor a Page – we are working with local businesses to develop new services – further information will be available later in the year. If you would like to sponsor a page or suggest a new service that would benefit the community, we’d love to hear from you. Email info@ryenews.org.uk
About Rye – we’ve recently added a Local Information page under About Rye which we will develop further.
Get in Touch
We’d love to get your feedback, hear your views, but most of all we need volunteers with a range of specialisms from writing, editing, design, marketing, administration, social media, networking or simply feed us stories. Come and join our small team and make Rye News even better. You can find out more about us at About Rye News. See Contact us if you would like to get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.
Image Credits: J. Minter .