New membership marketing training site

A good friend of mine, who knows his stuff, has recently launched a new service. He is offering professional training for people who would like to market membership organisations more effectively. The training is directed specifically at the particular needs of membership organisations, and covers such aspects as:

• How to recruit more members
  
• How to manage membership recruitment
• How to measure membership recruitment performance
• Recruitment techniques and processes
• Targetting the most interested potential members
• Membership retention techniques

For more information, and to book onto any of his courses, see his website: http://www.membership-matters.co.uk

U-plus 2 tandem trailer bike stolen

STOP PRESS: Word went around locally, and our U-plus 2 was eventually returned by someone anonymous. It had been damaged a little, but is still in working order. Mindless joy-riders, we think. The mountain bike, complete with rare mount for a Miklink trailer, has disappeared forever.

Sadly someone has ridden off with our red Creswell-made U-plus 2 tandem trailer bike. Stolen in the night between 10pm Wednesday 11 August and the following morning, from our house in Lancing, West Sussex, UK. The trailer bike is large, and would need a large car or van to transport it inside, and needs a lot of space to store it: much like a tandem tricycle would.

The trailer bike was attached to my old-and-rusty pink and turquoise mountain bike, as pictured. The U-plus 2 is getting tatty (it has had several owners) with battered rear mudguards, but is in good working order. The rear handlebars are a bit loose, with a rubber shim inserted to try to keep them straight.

This is pretty-much the same bike as the Pashley U-plus 2, but the earlier model made by Creswell Engineering.



Note that we know of one other family in Lancing who own a read U-plus two, but otherwise these trailer bikes are rare (and desirable for cycling families) as Pashley no longer make them. They only appear on eBay at the rate of one a year or so.

Grubtown Tourist Board site goes live!

Well, after only a week, the new Grubtown Tourist Board's web site (http://www.visitgrubtown.com) is picking up nicely. We have 90+ registered users and lots of nice new news stories and reviews to add to the Grubtown Daily Herald newspaper.

The site really benefits from the ideas of Six to Start (the folk that managed the project and came up with the design), and the lovely illustrations from Jim Paillot. Not to forget, of course, the wild imagination and writing techniques of Philip Ardagh (aka Beardy Ardagh).

For the technically-minded, the site was built using Drupal 6, with some custom maps using the Google Maps API. While Drupal and various contributed modules have provided much of the functionality out-of-the-box, there were still plenty of minor changes and customisations to make.

I've enjoyed creating this site, though: my first one with a falling cows option on every page!

Regnum Blinds website re-design

Just been working on a very nice new design for the Regnum Blinds website (http://www.regnumblinds.co.uk) - suppliers of sun blinds and awnings to homes, businesses and schools in the West Sussex area.

Used Drupal as the framework, with a custom theme based on the Zen starterkit: homepage has a separate template to get the custom layout. Might think about using Panels next time.