We created the British Towns and Villages Network in 1999 as a non-profit making organisation, to link together all those things that are British. To, in effect, put things in the order that we expect to find them, regions in the countries, counties in the regions, districts and boroughs in the counties, and towns and villages in the boroughs and districts including the Inner Hebrides, Outer Hebrides, the Northern Isles and even the Isle of Man or our sister site the Commonwealth of Nations
We are now down to the towns and villages and putting the communities and other groups in the correct place. We needed a vehicle to hold it all and we wanted that to be as interesting and easy to use as possible. So far we appear to be achieving success as the British Towns Network , if you search for "British Towns" or "Towns and Villages", is now in the NUMBER ONE position on MSN, Google, Yahoo and many other search engines. In its first year of operation we received over ONE MILLION page requests, a number that is growing by the day. In the late spring of 2007, receiving over 3,000 page views per day and rapidly outgrowing its old MS Access 97 databases we commenced the formation of a company, Jevstar Ltd, to manage the British Towns and Villages website and to expand the site's commercial activity in an unobtrusive style befitting a British website. So far this development has been successful increasing our visitor count in excess of 11,000 page views per day but this has not been without cost and effort as to service the increased load the databases have been upgraded to MS SQL and the site moved into a "load balanced" environment.
In order to provide such a service we have utilised the power of some of the largest "players in the game". The commercial servers are provided by Fasthosts, one of the UK's largest commercial internet hosting organisations. Registration of our sites is with over 100 of the worlds largest search engines and directories, and re-registration will be totally automatic after each site receives major additions. Being a company has also brought on new responsibilities for example we have registered with the Information Commissioner as required by the Data Protection Act although we have always maintained a privacy policy and voluntarily followed the recommendations of the Information Commissioner.
You will not find many 'glitzy' meaningless graphics on the pages in the British Towns and Villages Network or anything else which takes time to download. What you will find is information which is fast to retrieve and search engines which get you to what you want quickly. We have links with every County, Borough and District Council in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and will also link to the best of the available websites for towns, villages and other communities we can find, so that as much information is available to the user as possible.
We have many other NEW ideas not yet seen of the internet and we will be using our expertise to bring these into operation as soon as possible. One thing is sure, this is a very BRITISH solution to the chaos of the internet. Some of these new ideas are now being activated with the insertion of the ATTRACTIONS and the NATIONAL EVENTS DAIRY that will be appearing on all the location pages of this site. This will classify these aspects of British life in a wholly new way.