Newcastle Rocks: Saturday morning prep at The Strand

For some simple and effective content, try posting some photos of your local area on your website, these can either be taken by yourself, contributed to you or something you’ve found elsewhere online.

Photos can be a local landscape, landmark or just something that really encapsulates local life, such as the above photo of Saturday morning prep at The Strand on the new Newcastle Rocks website (Northern Ireland).

BiNS Friday Photo: German Market by Karen Strunks

Birmingham it’s Not Shit made a nice little feature of local photos with its regular Friday Photo slot from photographer Karen Strunks.  Karen is also creator of the 4am Project – another way to gather some interesting images for your site by taking photos at the magical time of 4am!

Don’t worry too much about the quality or taking brilliantly artistic shots, no-one’s expecting you to become David Bailey, just tell simple stories with a pictures. But if you’re not a keen photographer yourself maybe you could ask for contributions from your readers, as many might be keen to bring their photo collection to a local audience?  Is there a Flickr group in your area, a little like Birmingham Flickrmeets Group, which holds monthly photo walks? If so, try joining and talking to its members to see if they might be interested in working with you on your website and publishing some of their images of the area on there.

Camp Hill Flyover, Birmingham, 1970 by Lady Wulfrun

Search Flickr regularly for interesting local photos – if they are not available for you to use under Creative Commons (follow link for explanation), contact the photographer and ask if they’d mind you using it.  As your site is a non-commercial venture for the community, nine times out of ten the answer will be yes, as long as you attribute the photographer.

And don’t forget to look for some older photos of your area to get reader reminiscing on how things used to look!  When I found the above photo of the long-gone Camphill flyover and published it on Digbeth is Good, people commented with their memories of driving over it.  People may have interesting old photos hidden away – you might like to look into scanning and posting those online to bring them to a wider audience?

So get busy with your cameras, ask those around you to help out by doing the same and start looking at what’s already being published online to add some lovely imagery to your site and really give your readers an eyeful!

Nicky is the Communications Manager at Talk About Local – recruiting, training and working with IT trainers and active citizens across the UK to help them create and develop simple yet effective community websites and online profiles. She managed the popular Birmingham hyperlocal website Digbeth is Good since it began in May 2008 until December 2011. Nicky is interested in ways of using storytelling, game-playing and events within communities to tell their stories and effect positive change.

Nicky Getgood

View all posts by Nicky Getgood
Nicky's website

Possibly Related Posts:

• Karen Strunks at Show and TAL
• Content idea: publish a local notice or poster
• Some Useful Links 13/10/2010
• Ten Questions: Karen Strunks of Wake Green Park
• Content idea: introduce your Safer Neighbourhood Team to the community