Poultry Website Upgrade Finished!

Well we’ve finally finished upgrading the Poultry Pages web site. It’s been an awful lot of work, more than I thought originally, but if a job’s worth doing as they say.

Just as with this allotment web site, I’ve put in a search facility and re-organised the articles somewhat to make things easier to find. Of course, it’s now mobile friendly as well as working on a computer.

Nearly 100 New Pages!

We’ve re-written and updated a lot of pages and added nearly a 100 new pages. I’ve greatly expanded the section on how poultry used to be kept with beautiful illustrations by Ludlow and Harrison Weir. They were famous artists of the Victorian era.

Queen Victoria herself was a poultry keeper – well she was assisted by Lieutenant-Colonel Wemyss, Lord Lincoln, and Mr. Engall, her Majesty’s intelligent and respected bailiff! There’s no mention of who got the job of mucking out the coops.

I discovered a book of poultry house plans and I’ve uploaded the ones I think people will find useful today. The commercial house designs were for 50 to 100 birds, a bit different to modern systems with 25,000 birds!

Reading those old books from before the First World War which changed so much, opens a window onto a different world. Some of it is quite funny – authors seemed to think having a chapter in their book rubbishing another author and his works was quite acceptable.

They may be over a hundred years old but a chicken is still a chicken and a lot of what they had to say is valid today. Just the same with gardening, many of the methods and techniques have little changed.

It’s not all history on the site – there’s a lot of information for backgarden keepers new and old that’s totally up to date. New articles cover pasture feeding and Omega 3 and topics like why we should stop being dependent on soya for animal feeds.

The best thing, from my point of view, is that adding new pages is so much easier for me now. No more firing up the web page editing software, remembering to update menus so people can find the new page and so forth. Now I just write and press publish, everything else is automatic.

With the Poultry Pages, I’ve now finished the main site updating which is a relief. It’s been the equivalent of writing a book. I’ve a lot more I’d like to add to both the allotment site and the poultry pages but right now I’ve a lot to do outside before winter arrives.