Wednesday 20 April 2011

Malvern Hills struggles to identify Tenbury.

Malvern Hills District Council is pleased to announce the launch of its brand new Visit the Malverns website that is full of useful information about the area. It has been developed by Hughes Media of Stanford Bridge in conjunction with Malvern TIC staff.
So far so good?  According to this "brand new website" "The cattle / sheep market is held on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

It's so good that despite Tenbury being the home of no less than 4 Malvern Hills District Council Councillors including the leader of the Council, when it comes to Tourist & Visitor information there is such poor quality information being published. Even the website designers live quite close.

Perhaps they can be forgiven to using an out of date map (even though a revised one has been produced), & yes the Tenbury TIC only moved last weekend (although the move had been planned for quite some while), but please the Cattle Market has been closed for many years.

The site has chosen to use only two very poor photo's of Tenbury (contrast that to 8 on the Malvern page)

The what's on section seems to mostly exclude Tenbury.  No mention of the Food Fair or Applefest (although they do list Bromyard's Applefest).  There is a mention of the 1941 weekend, but linked to the wrong website.

As for accommodation, Tenbury appears to be to be almost barren, yet even the National papers seem to manage to list some local providers amongst the Best in Britain.

This is a very good example why people of Tenbury continue to feel that they get very little benefit from MHDC.



Update 2pm: Looks like some corrections have already been uploaded. 
Update 11am Sat 23/4/11: More updates including some photo's I took yesterday.
Update Fri 29/4 : Site has now been rewritten

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why so negative?

Surely it is good that they had Tenbury primary write the text?

@WR15 said...

I thought I recognised the text. It seems to have been lifted from this website.

http://www.malvernhills.gov.uk/cms/leisure-and-culture/tourism/tenbury-wells.aspx

So the same errors (& same naff photo's) are also on this page.

It then appears to have been copied to here,

http://www.aboutbritain.com/towns/tenbury-wells.asp

and edited slightly. No Sheep & Cattle. but still showing a market Tues & Thurs instead of Tuesday, Friday & Saturday

and then to here,

http://www.worcestershiretouristguides.com/Articles/Article_136.asp

I wonder how many times the Council Tax Payer has paid for the same bit of text!

Anonymous said...

@WR15, the visitthemalverns.org site was organised by the same people that manage that section of the Malvern Hills District Council web site and is ultimately intended to replace that section. This is the reason why the text has been reused.

Anonymous said...

Additionally I am sure that if you direct any constructive suggestions for improvements to info@visitthemalverns.org or indeed directly through the contact page, they will be duly considered.

Given the current ongoing cuts to local authority funding I am surprised they are able to fund a new tourism web site at all so I think that rather than being wholly negative about the new site it could be more beneficial to people in our area to be constructive.

If you've got better images than the "naff photos" used then why not send them to them?

Anonymous said...

Presumably the work was contracted out to someone in London or India, so they can't be expected to have any idea about what's going on here. How much has this rubbish cost us?

@WR15 said...

Well the website is attributed to Hughes Media at Stanford Bridge, but the text appears to have been around quite a while and copied from one site to another, so hopefully it hasn't cost very much. Questions are being asked.

Anonymous said...

Don't know whether to laugh or cry!!

Anonymous said...

Red faces all round I should think @WR15 I wonder if I can use this as a marketing ploy "The Lost town of Tenbury Wells" worked for Heligan!

Anonymous said...

Would renaming our town Malvern-on-Teme be the answer?

Anonymous said...

This proved that the people in Malvern know nothing about our area and care even less.
Who commissioned it, who approved it, and why did they get it so wrong?
Someone must be responsible for this mess.