You may be wondering what www.dursley.info is all about. Well if you are, here's the reason it's here today and why we built it.

I don't know about you, but everytime we wanted to find a plumber, or an electrician or find out the number of the local takeaway or opening times for the Library (and many other things) we'd end up searching all over the place trying to find the details. The internet is great, but sometimes finding local information is like looking for a needle in a haystack. For instance, earlier this year (2010) a friend of ours was looking for a Skip-Hire company locally but couldn't find one, so he ordered one from Gloucester instead. 

Things like this kept happening. We'd think of going to a pub or restaurant for a meal, and would usually come up with just a couple of places - but there's quite a choice of pubs and restaurants locally if you look hard enough. Then, when it came to shopping, all too often we'd end up "out of town" and when it came to having work done around our home we'd end up getting people in from miles away to do the work for us.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we decided to plan, develop and build a web site for Dursley and the surrounding area that would bring all the information we were looking for together. The idea was to make it easy for everyone using the site to use local businesses and shops and services. We thought long and hard about how we should structure the site and who would use it and decided that it should provide a valuable service to three major demographic groups which are shown below in no particular order:

Residents
Yes, Dursley.info is here for the good folks who live in and around Dursley and Cam. We wanted to provide you with a quick and easy to use local directory of shops and businesses, restaurants and pubs, hairdressers, dentists, doctors, places to go and things to do etc.  So far, so good!

Visitors
Now this is an interesting one. You may not think of the Dursley area as a holiday destination, but you'd be surprised how many tourists make their way through the town (and hopefully stop for a while too). Dursley is on the Cotswold Way, which means we get a lot of walkers passing through. With local attractions like Berkeley Castle, Cattle Country and Thistledown and places of interest like Slimbridge WWT, Tyndales Monument and the Jenner Museum all within 5 minutes wouldn't it be nice to help visitors base a holiday or break in or around Dursley and use some of the local shops and businesses while there here.

Businesses and Shops
When you run a business (like we do) it's important that you let other businesses & individuals know you exist and what you do.  When it comes to shopping you may be surprised to learn that some people don't go into the town to shop - they go to Bristol, Cheltenham and Gloucester instead. The same is often true for businesses. How many of us (I'll include oursleves in this) use local businesses for office supplies, servicing of our office equipment, IT Support (that's us), electrics, lighting, shopfitting, etc.  There's a wide variety of business and shops in and around dursley and it's been really interesting for us to find out how many different types of business there are locally and how many we may be able to use in the future too for our business. If you run a business and you're not listed yet, why not add yourselves now?

Getting the whole thing working has taken considerable time, money and effort, and there's ongoing costs too for managing and maintaining the web site. We have an continuing investment in SEO and Search Engine Placement so that you can find the Dursley.info web site in the major search engines easily and we're also developing new features and facilities for the web site that we'll introduce over the coming months.

To make the dursley.info web site pay it's way and be self supporting, we charge a very modest (cheap) fee for adding your business listings (£50 for a basic listing and £100 for a standard listing). Your listing is active for a full 12 months giving you maximum exposure on the web site, oh, and in addition, when you add your business to dursley.info we also Facebook and Twitter your business listing to our small but growing community of followers on these services - just to give you that bit extra. We'll also remind you before your listing is due to expire so that hopefully you'll renew it and keep your business details online with us.

Well, there you have it. That's what Dursley.info is all about and why it's here. If you're wondering who we are...  We're Architectronic, a locally based IT Services and Support company and we've been in business since 2000. Originally we had our offices in Dursley, but had to move when we outgrew them.  Our offices are now just down the road in Stone - although everyone that works here lives in Dursley and Cam. Our web site is www.architectronic.com - take a look sometime.

Thanks
Alan