Upgrade to The Poultry Pages

Running the web site takes a little more work than you might imagine in the background. I think it’s worth sharing a few statistics – in an average month we get over a third of a million visitors to the site and serve over 3 million pages to them. It’s mind boggling how my hobby site has grown!

As it got bigger, new problems arose. Things like bandwidth, server cpu capacity, database connectivity. Confused? I was! Luckily my hosting company offer a managed service where I just worry about what is on the site rather than the technology. Or in other words, I just drive it and they keep the engine running.

Now one problem with the internet is things change so quickly that in just a few years the site starts to look a bit tired and in need of some attention. So we’ve been busy with an upgrade.

The forums, recipes and this diary section are not affected but the main site and the poultry pages really needed a bit of a face lift. I’ve finished the poultry pages now and they seem to be working fine. The main allotment site is a little way off though. I’ve got technical support in on the main site or it would never get finished. Even so there’s a lot of work just checking and tweaking them when the techies have done their bit.

One big success on the poultry pages has been the breeders and suppliers lists. I used to get quite a few emails asking where to buy hens from and it seemed obvious there was a need for a list of local suppliers that people could look up.

Now I look on this as a service for my visitors and so it’s absolutely free to the breeders to list on. Our forum administrator, “Aunt Sally” was wonderful, emailing loads of breeders to tell them about it. Well now we have nearly 300 breeders listed and it’s still growing fast.

This created another problem, finding the suppliers in a local area. So initially I broke it down into England, Scotland and Wales but that got cumbersome so I further broke it down into areas like the North West. Those lists got bulky so now I’ve broken it down further into individual counties.

Not everyone is looking for hens though, some people are looking for hatching eggs, others are looking for ducks, some for geese and so on. Thanks to the wonder of databases, I’ve been able to offer the lists in such a way that these are easy to find now.

So, if you’re looking for a poultry supplier – these are the main pages to go to:

• Poultry Suppliers In England by County
• Poultry Suppliers in Wales by County
• Poultry Suppliers in Scotland by County
• Suppliers of Live Hatching Eggs
• Suppliers of Ducks
• Suppliers of Geese
• Suppliers of Quail
• Suppliers of Turkeys
• Suppliers of Bantams

I hope those prove easier to use and really useful for everyone.

Having finished the upgrade on the poultry pages, the next job is the big one, the main allotment pages. Watch this space!