WHAT’S THE SITE ABOUT ?
England’s North East is an independent regional hub and portal primarily focused on promoting and writing about the region’s history and heritage. We aim to promote the best of the region, including local businesses, services, culture, creativity and places to eat. Hopefully you will find the site a rich source of information about the region with a special focus on history, heritage and culture.
Our site’s coverage takes in Newcastle, Tyneside, Sunderland, Northumberland, County Durham, the Tees Valley and neighbouring North Yorkshire. We will also make trips in the future to Cumbria, the North West and the Scottish Borders.
As we continue to grow we will be developing new content and occasional blogs.
In our focus on history and heritage we try to get out and about and photograph places in colour as they are today to encourage people to go out and explore. In some ways we are a hybrid between a tourism ‘places to visit’ type of site and a history type site, but our focus is on detailed history. We differ from history sites in photographing places as they can be seen and visited today rather than being a repository for old black and white photographs and old maps.
There are over 4,200 colour photographs on the site mostly by David Simpson that have been specially photographed for the site. In addition we have created numerous colour maps depicting aspects of history along with other graphics. We sell maps depicting North East heritage at our sister site Tangled Worm.
SITE HISTORY 1990s TO PRESENT
Our site is at least 24 years-old, so it was around before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Wikipedia. Most recently it was redeveloped and re-launched in the spring of 2016 and has undergone some design changes in 2022.
We began life as the North East history pages, developed by local historian, journalist, publisher and historian, David Simpson who has operated the site under the current domain name englandsnortheast.co.uk since 2009.
The site was originally adapted from a series of regionally focused books written and published by David in 1991. As a content-rich resource, the site was quickly picked up by popular search engines with history and culture generating lots of interest.
Compuserve Our World (1998-2000) North East History Pages
Our site itself traces its roots back to the later 1990s. It’s such a long way back now that we can’t exactly be sure when it was established. We think it was late in 1996 or 1997 but it was certainly in operation by at least November 1998 (when it first appears in the ‘way back when’ web archives).
Initially we were a Compuserve site called ‘The North East England History Pages’ and had the rather cumbersome web address of ourworld.compuserve.com/ homepages/north_east_england_history_page/ The whole site and its content had a dark blue design featuring yellow or white text, much like our present day site logo and banner.
Freeserve (2000-2007) : thenortheast.fsnet.co.uk
In September 2000 we moved the North East History Pages to Freeserve with the new, more easily remembered web address being thenortheast.fsnet.co.uk. For a time the site design featured white pages and pale pink and red coloured banners and columns.
TalkTalk (2007-2009) : northeastengland.talktalk.net
By February 2007 we moved to a talktalk server with the new address northeastengland.talktalk.net According to the web information company, Alexa, the old site at northeastengland.talktalk.net accounted for a staggering 19.1% of all the talktalk.net traffic, taking the site-traffic Bronze, only just behind talktalk.net itself (20%) with the talktalk.net mail server (30.4%) taking the Gold (Source: Alexa.com July 2009). I think the site’s success and popularity is a measure of the passion and interest people have in the North East region.
England’s North East 2009 : englandsnortheast.co.uk
Finally, we moved to our present domain englandsnortheast.co.uk which we acquired in July 2009. In 2009 we also acquired a domain specific to Yorkshire and for a few years we separated the Yorkshire sections of the site (part of the site from the beginning) into a separate website but these are once again part of the England’s North East site. The Yorkshire parts of the site focus mostly on York and North Yorkshire.
Since 2009 we have also owned the domain englandsnorth.co.uk as it has always been our intention for the site to eventually extend its coverage to the whole of Northern England including Cumbria, the North West and its cities as well as more detail on West Yorkshire towns, cities and countryside along with Hull and East Yorkshire.
Our focus at present is still primarily Northumberland, Durham, Tyneside, Wearside and the Tees Valley and the site’s continuing success and popularity is a measure of the passion and interest people have in the North East region.
If you need to get in touch please use this contact link.
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Thank you,
David