Why local news site Wrexham.com is 'quietly confident' for the future

For years Rob Taylor had been keeping his eye on the domain name Wrexham.com. As a resident of the North Wales town with an interest in the buying and selling of domain names, he was keen to get his hands on the URL and fulfill an ambition to build his own Wrexham-related website.

Just less than a year ago, in July 2011, Wrexham.com became his. At the start he set off by trying to follow a traditional newspaper model when it came to design, but found this to be rather "word-heavy". Since then a custom design has seen the site evolve into its current form.

The site recently moved into its own office space in the town centre, and since the end of April has a full-time journalist on its staff. The site is overseen by Taylor, with a third member of staff helping out with marketing-related business as is needed.

For Taylor the important thing is that the site works hard to produce original news, with immediacy in mind wherever possible - assisted by the central location of its new office.

As for the business side the site, it will be taking advertising from 1 July, with direct ad sales being made to local businesses and service providers.

"Due to essentially the low cost operation of the website, we don't have to make loads of money to survive and be sustainable," Taylor told Journalism.co.uk.

"We've got quite a low bar set to make sure we're sustainable going forward and be here in the next few years. We're quietly confident given the feedback we've had so far and we're already getting orders in in terms of ads.

"So hopefully the ads will be both useful to the readers but also locally recognisable as well, which works both ways in terms of making it look authentic to both reader and advertiser, and hopefully useful as well."

The latest audience figures for the site show 53,000 visits in the past 30 days, and just over 131,500 page views.

Part of the site's strategy is to offer not just local news content but to be a wider resource for residents and visitors alike. The site operates a weather station and webcams around town offering live footage.

As part of the live strategy the site also recently launched a crowdsourced fuel prices monitor system, offering updated information on the cost of fuel at petrol stations across town.

Earlier this year the site ran a liveblog offering fuel price updates in recognition of fuel-related national news events. This has now developed into an on-site application launched at the end of May which enables users to log into the system via the site forum and upload the latest fuel prices they have seen.

As well as providing the information on its website Wrexham.com also tweets out the latest prices in the morning at around 8.30am and at midday.

"It's part of making it genuinely useful for real people in the town," Taylor added.

The site is also due to launch a free iPhone app and iPad app by the end of July which will incorporate this feature, and the ability to submit prices and have notifications sent to them. Users will also be able to submit stories by taking images of news events which are geolocated and sent to the newsdesk.

He added that the site's "Wrexham tenner", a £10 incentive for specially selected story tip-offs and submissions, has also shown that "people are quite excited to be part of the news process".

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