News

The new Lostwithiel town website featured in an article in WMN2 of the Western Morning News on 25th February.

Lostwithiel in cyberspace as town site launches

A CLOSE-KNIT Cornish business community has pitched in together to develop and launch a website that is already attracting 200 visitors a day.

More than half of the businesses in and around Lostwithiel have chipped in to pay the £3,000 it has taken to develop, launch and maintain the site - www.lostwithiel.org.uk - which has already had hits from as far afield as Canada.

The site was created to promote many of the enterprises tucked away from the town's thriving Fore Street and to attract visitors, as well as reflect its identify as a "self-sufficient town".

Members of the Lostwithiel's Business Forum agreed to pay for the cost of the site through their annual subscriptions, and hope it will also be a virtual meeting point for the town's other active forums and community groups.

Business Forum chairman Adrian Barrat said the group had selected local IT firm Iteracy to develop the site, after putting the bid out to tender. Local professionals, including a copywriter and graphic design firm, Revival, had also devoted time and energy into getting the virtual Lostwithiel up and running.

The antiques shop owner hopes the site will also become a hub to promote events held by a number of other organisations which have won the town - population 3,000 - a reputation as a lively and community-minded neighbourhood.

Groups include a film society, the organisers of three separate annual week-long festivals and the Town Forum - which has plans for a nature reserve by the River Fowey.

Events include the town's Christmas-time Dickensian Evening, which was filmed in 2009 for broadast as part of a programme on Rick Stein's Cornwall, to be broadcast later in the year.

The town is also part of the Transition Town movement, which aims for communities to become self-sufficient and its King's Arms was recently voted Community Pub of the Year by St Austell Breweries.

"It's a busy little town," Mr Barratt said. "And nowhere else in Cornwall still has a main street that is full of occupied shops.

David Retallack, whose fitted kitchen company is part of the "hidden" Lostwithiel business community that has no shop front, said: "We're hoping that the website will get more people from the town using local business, as well as people from other parts of Cornwall.

"We already had our own website and nigh on half of our business now comes through that. People may see adverts - but it's the website that leads them to pick up the phone and call you."

Text courtesy of the Western Morning News