Why Love Coggeshall?

While you may have learnt a bit more about Coggeshall while using the website, you might be wondering how it came to be.

It was designed and developed by We Create Digital, a small digital agency based in Coggeshall. We have been here for nearly four years. In that time, some of our team have got more involved in the community and we realised there are some challenges that the village is facing. These aren’t exclusive to Coggeshall but are being experienced by many rural villages and towns around the country – the conversion of shops to residential homes, overdevelopment and a lack of investment.

While we can’t help with many of these issues, we decided to set up a website to try and do our bit to help. The vision for this website was to find a way to support businesses, community groups and share general information about what is going on. Social media is a great way to post and share things, it can create a bit of noise and you often can’t find what you are actually looking for. Or you have to spend a lot of time scrolling!

We hope this will be a website that enables any business to list who they are and what they do, potentially helping to increase the number of customers they have and improve their SEO. Additionally, as new people move in to Coggeshall, it can be difficult to find out what there is to do. With community listings, it is possible to search and see what there is that suits your interests. If it is one-off events you are looking for, hopefully again you can find something listed.

We know Coggeshall isn’t the largest place to live (and this is one of the reasons why many of us love it so much!) so we have tried to extend its reach to the surrounding areas. Many of us are happy to travel to the neighbouring villages to try a new restaurant or use a recommended business; we wanted to reflect that in the website.

This website will never look to make a profit – we don’t want to charge people when we are simply trying to help. We do ask for donations, but those are just to allow us to keep maintaining this website. It is our own time we are using, as well as that of our team and we do have their salaries to pay! If you would like to advertise your business, then we will ask for a small payment and also if a business is regularly posting events then we will nudge for a donation. But otherwise, we hope people will actively list their business, group, event or activity and will find the website useful.

This is a project that we plan on committing to for the long-term, should people indeed find it helpful. Given this, it may take time for content to be added to the site. The only way this will happen more quickly is for people to spread the word. So please tell someone you know, whether they are self-employed and work from home, are part of a more well-established organisation with employees, or run a community group.

There are also new features we hope to introduce later this year and we will write about this in the news section as and when we are ready to share more. But if you have an idea, we would love to hear from you.

We don’t want to exclude anyone from this website but we do ask that people remain respectful in using it. Any content being added to the site is moderated and requires our approval first, so anything inappropriate or offensive will not be published!

If you have any questions about Love Coggeshall, then please not hesitate to get in touch.