This is what our £185,000.00 ‘We Are Weymouth’ website currently looks like!
Weymouth Bank Holiday weekend sees a many different events throughout the town. This weekend has been no different. We’ve seen the return of Quayside Festival outside Rendezvous, Fayre in the Square and the Wessex Folk Festival around Brewers Quay and Fireworks on the Esplanade.
Businesses have knuckled down all week and throughout the bank holiday to take what they can, and for the best part of it The people of Weymouth have done great. Could we have done better though?
This weekend the website “We Are Weymouth”, that has been paid for with Weymouth BID Levy payers money has been “experiencing technical problems”. As a result of this the website in its entirety has been unavailable to anyone. Has this had a knock on effect? Probably! The Weymouth BID website claims that the We Are Weymouth site attracts 2 million page views in 2017. With this site being unavailable for 3 days over a bank holiday it’s safe to assume that over 20,000 page views have been missed.
It seems that the new marketing team that have been appointed don’t work weekends, or bank holidays. Even in emergencies like this. Once the bank holiday had concluded the website kicked back into life, specifically Tuesday 28thMay 2019 around midday.
Even this was short lived, it seems that the website has now been removed and a fresh and empty version of WordPress has taken its place. So, Weymouth; we’ve paid well over the odds for a website in the first place and now a few thousand a month to keep it up-to-date and ‘live’.
Is this good enough from The BID2 or have we, the levy payers been duped again? The BID2 have been in effect for almost a year and we’re now at a stand point where: ‘do we allow this waste of money to happen all over again’, or do we demand better?
Not every business owner and levy payer has the time to chase The BID2 around for spending budgets, and we should be able to trust that our hard earned money is spent in the right areas. Please get this website back up and running ASAP and become a little more vigilant with the companies that do work on your, and our behalves! Accepting excuses for subpar services should not be within our remit. Complicity will kill this town and we need to chase these services that are failing us.
The website needs to work for all the businesses in the town and is integral to our success, especially in the summer months. How is this being treated so flippantly to being up and down? Put OUR money where your mouth is Weymouth BID and help us make this town what it deserves to be.
