MANCHESTER BIRDING WEBSITE IS 20 YEARS OLD THIS MONTH!

Those who have been around long enough may recall the inception of the Manchester Birding website (but not the forum which came a month later), way back in September 2006. Its aim, simply to collate birding in the county of Greater Manchester. To give birders somewhere to post their photos, trip reports and anything else they felt the need to get off their chests, to distribute county birding news and along the way, to try and improve and enliven county birding with articles such as identification, birding tales, rarity accounts and the likes. To that aim it was an overwhelming and resounding success too but, time waits for no man of course.

With the dramatic rise in social media, personal blogs and the likes the amount of those contributing to the website has much declined but nevertheless, its usefulness remains apparently intrinsic. Its popularity has wained little and for a website predominantly for a little inland north-west England county, I personally think that’s quite remarkable, certainly after 20 years.

Whilst I personally do not wish to think of all the time, effort and not to mention money invested in the website by myself over those 20 years, it remains all still worth it thanks to those who continue to enjoy its content and much of that is also thanks of course to those who contribute with their photos, videos, information and articles. Without those it would considerably poorer and my heartfelt thanks to everyone who does or has contributed, no matter how large or how little.

Back in the day, the website looked like the below image, built with little to no understanding and an awful lot of time and effort by myself on a very rudimentary platform but in January 2017 it took on a totally new design and platform to what exists today, something which I might add is much easier to administer.

And what for the website’s future? As long as it is continued to be used and enjoyed it will most probably remain. It is more of a family member than a website to me these days after tending it daily for all that time but whatever comes, I can only thank you all for browsing its pages and for making it the success it has been.

​Cheers, Ian