mablethorpe.infoThe Mablethorpe website was created by Keith Butters of Bowhunter Websites in 2001 with the co-operation of the Town Council and Tourism Forum to promote Mablethorpe as a place to live, shop, visit and stay. It briefly used the domain mablethorpe-lincs.co.uk before settling on the more descriptive mablethorpe.info. Upon Keith’s retirement in 2018, Bowhunter websites and mablethorpe.info were taken over by Chris Drew from MGC Websites Ltd (a website developer in Mablethorpe) and this site was relaunched in January 2019.
Thank you to all who supported the Mablethorpe website project which was set up to serve the community and launched in 2001.
We appreciate the encouragement given by the Town Council of Mablethorpe & Sutton on Sea and Tony Cumberworth, the Town Clerk at the time; also, the Tourism Forum and Michael Kheng who was the chairman in 2001.
We thank all the businesses and individuals that made the financing of the project possible.
We are so pleased that Chris Drew of MGC Websites Ltd is carrying on developing the website which promotes the image and features of Mablethorpe to the whole world.Keith and Janet Butters (founders of Bowhunter Websites and Mablethorpe.info)
Built To Last
Businesses pay a modest fee for their own page which effectively sponsors the rest of the sites content from free pages for groups, and clubs to the publicising of events and writing of articles etc. For their money each business receives a professionally built web page on the area’s leading website exposing them to tens of thousands of website visitors every year.
This business model has kept the site viable as dozens of copy-cat sites have come and gone.
Mablethorpe.info Letters of Recommendation
We thank the Town Council and Tourism Forum who both endorsed the creation of this website back in 2001
Mablethorpe.info Website Redesigns
Mablethorpe.info has had a few redesigns since 2001 and has seen the introduction of Responsive Web Design (websites that can display on small screen devices like the iPhone), Content Management Systems (where pages are built on demand by pulling the content from a database and inserting it into a template), Secure Certificates (encrypting the communications between the web server and your device) and much more.
Initially it had to squeeze data through slow dial-up connections before enjoying the luxury of high speed broadband only to see mobile users starting to browse the web on slower connections making speed a priority once more.
In 2013 the Mablethorpe Area Partnership took a stake in mablethorpe.info and secured funding to port the ‘flat’ (hand coded) site to the Joomla Content Management System for the first time. This work was subcontracted to a third party. At this stage the site started to offer basic (free) listings to all businesses based in Mablethorpe in order to better promote the town as a whole.
We have also witnessed the rise – and seemingly now the beginning of the fall – of Social Media which presented both an opportunity and challenge for small local businesses.
In 2018 MGC Websites Ltd acquired Bowhunter Websites and it’s assets including the Mablethorpe website which received a quick tidy up to keep it going through 2018. In January 2019 the site was relaunched running on a highly modified Content Management System to make it more feature rich and more efficient to update than any of it’s predecessors.
