I have been toying with the idea of redesigning the site for a while now. What’s been putting me off is that it doesn’t receive an awful amount of traffic, and well, Wild Routes is mainly focused on the outdoors, so I didn’t want to spend lot’s of time building the right “online experience”.
But as I thought about it more and more, I decided that maybe is time to do it after all.
Wild Routes is all about the community: the people it is made up of, and the interesting stories and ideas they bring along. The Wild Routes summer events have been a huge success over the last few years, with the numbers steadily growing and everyone asking after the next year’s event as soon as they are over.
What is missing however, is something to span the gap between these events. Something to allow the continuation of idea and opinion sharing going. Something to allow everyone to share their experiences and to initiate their own meet ups or events.
The current website is very lacking in this respect. So this is where the new website aims to step in.
It will aim to be completely open from the ground up and it should be created by the community, and be for the community.
Of course this is no easy feat, and something that we take time to get right. This is where we officially invite you to get involved!
There are many different ways you can help, take a look at the three ideas below to get you inspired.
At the moment Wild Routes hosts a summer meet each year at Biggin Hill. It’s a much loved event with lots of great people, food and projects. But we want it to provide more than that. We want the events, adventures or experiments to come from you.
The new site will allow everyone to create and join events, help plan them and keep up to date with the latest updates.
If you have any ideas of events we should host then let us know, and why not help us organise them?! Let’s make sure the new website is a lively and happening place.
If you’re more of a writer then why not help us create some new content for the website? We still need to find away of introducing Wild Routes to people and explaining to them what it is all about, without overwhelming them and scaring them away.
If you have ideas then why not jot them down and send them our way?
Or write about something you did recently that you want to share and we can get it up in the new blog. Writing posts and sharing interesting links will soon be as easy as writing an email.
And if you really want to get stuck in then why not help develop the site itself? The whole code base will be open source, hosted under our Github repository, to allow any one to checkup on security, learn new techniques or help out in developing new features.
In whatever capacity, we would love you to get in touch and help us. It doesn’t matter how much experience or knowledge you have on the subject, I will be learning new technology as well!
Let’s create something special. Something that we will all benefit from and love to use.
If you are interested get in touch using our contact form.
We are looking forward to hearing from you!