It is straightforward to get involved with us at Okehampton.Org. We need to explain what we do and why we believe that we are important to the Community. We encourage you to register on the web site as a User and make contributions about you, your charity or your business.

Why we believe Okehampton.Org is important

In this modern world, more or less everyone uses Social Media like Facebook and also the internet for many reasons including shopping, education and pleasure. The existence of modern smartphones makes using applications like Facebook for lots of different reasons than just messaging or keeping in touch, the other uses include advertising things for sale, events and publishing news. The problem with using Social Media for these latter reasons, is that Social Media is essentially ephemeral, once viewed and read, it is extremely difficult to recover or find again the information you wanted to remember. Okehampton.Org seeks to solve that! Things like news, events and adverts are much better suited to a program like Okehampton.Org which relies on a database to store and display information for months and years.

Search Engines like Google and Bing make it easy to find information about anything as long as the business, association or activity has a web presence - a web site! Not all businesses, organisations and associations do! Furthermore it can be very difficult to find local information buried among national entries and sponsored or paid advertising.

It costs very little to design, program and publish a website, if you have the knowledge and the skill but not everyone does, so because we have the knowledge and the time plus we care about the community we live in, we are putting our skills and our website, Okehampton.Org, at your disposal.

Our Objective

We want to make Okehampton.Org a hub of information about the Community in and around Okehampton. It is not a website for visitors and travellers, though it should contain information that will be useful and valuable. It is a website for the 15,000 residents who live in and around Okehampton and who depend on it for their employment, shopping, welfare and leisure.

It is primarily a free resource but it will be looking to make some revenue via advertising on either the website or on a physical community newspaper in the future. To establish a supporting community newspaper will need revenue from advertising (or other sources) plus a delivery network. Volunteers welcomed!

Facilities

Virtually all of the facilities of the website are open to registered users to make contributions directly and for themselves. So if you run a business or are involved in any form of association or organisation, you can register on the website as a member or user and submit contributions. At this time you can submit a post or news article (and this includes an opinion article that would be classed as a Letter to the Editor in a magazine or newspaper). You can send us an event for the calendar which is a type of news article. Articles and events are categorised and given tags. Once the date of the event or the relevance of the article is passed, they will be archived but in the future, these archives will be searchable.

As well as receiving submissions from members, the editors of the website will be working hard to include information coming from lots of sources, especially from the local authorities, which benefits the community and its residents.

The website provides a searchable directory of businesses, associations and organisations. If you are the owner of a local business, adverting your Company is free or charge. You can also use your listing as a jumping off point for your own website or social media information. On the other hand, if you currently do not have any form of internet presence then take advantage of our facilities. Our Directory will be indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing and you may begin to benefit from our exposure of your products and service.

We also offer a simple classified advertising service. Cards for items for sale are very similar to the card for the business directory. Okehampton.Org does not intend to compete with the large and specialist solutions for the sale of second-hand items, such as Facebook Marketplace, eBay or Vinted. We may, however, offer our own solution in the future (Adscliq) if there is sufficient demand. As well as advertising items for sale and wanted, the classified adverts can also be used for job advertising. But again a specialist employment portal is planned for the future (Jobscliq).

The website also has a photo gallery and directory of useful websites. As a registered Member, you can upload photos for the gallery and submit useful websites for inclusion.

You will also discover that we publicise a series of downloadable PDF plans and documents pertaining to the community and also several videos and films, of interest to the community. If you have something to include in these categories please contact us.

Membership

The primary reason for registering on Okehampton.Org is so that you can create and modify your own submissions. For a while we will be moderating or approving all submissions but when you have established a reputation with the website, we will be able to trust your submissions and allow them to be published immediately.

Please understand that a small Community run website such as Okehampton.Org does not have the enormous resources of Facebook. You may have the facility to immediately publish anything on Facebook but be assured that an inappropriate entry would be flagged or deleted within minutes as the website has very sophisticated artificial intelligence checking every submission as it is posted. We cannot imagine that we would ever get to that point!

We take people on trust but we do ask for some contact details so that we can check up the entries if necessary.

If you consider Membership is too difficult, onerous or unnecessary, we are there to help. Send us the details of what you want to say or publish by email and we will do our best to oblige.

We have a few perks to offer registered members such as an email address related to Okehampton, that you can manage using webmail or an email program or App. We offer addresses on okeh.email. So you can have your name at okeh.email.

Finally

Do not hesitate to contact us with your ideas, comments and feedback. If you consider that Okehampton.Org and the Community could benefit from publishing something that we have not yet thought of, please feel free to contact us about it.