Our new website, Recovery Voices, is officially one week old. I thought I’d give you an initial update in this blog post. First of all though, I’d like to thank all of you who have visited the website and those who have signed up as Followers of our Recovery Voices Facebook page—which we will be using to inform you of new content posted on the website. In particular, I would like to thank those of you who have sent in kind comments about the website and/or congratulation messages on our launch.
We launched with just over 150 pages of content and links to over 300 short films, knowing that even the most ardent enthusiast would only be able to look at a small proportion of that content. However, we didn’t see the point of slowly ‘drip-feeding’ our initial content onto the website over many months.
At the same time, we had loaded more content into the database and will now start regularly posting it onto the website. Over the next five weeks, we will post regularly on our blog, and add new content to our Stories and Themes sections relating to our interviews with our first project participants—James Deakin, Huseyin Djemil, Wendy Dossett, Marcus Fair and David McCartney—and the interviews I had with my colleague Wulf Livingston.
I will be on holiday in Broome, one of my favourite places, from the 14-24 October, but will continue posting on the website, assuming no snags.
Wulf and I will be interviewing other people in the future, but I must emphasise that this process will proceed slowly, as I spend a considerable amount of time editing the interview into short films and writing summaries.
I am really pleased to say that we have now have now 247 Followers on our Recovery Voices Facebook page. It will take a good period of time for us to attract a significant number of people to this page and to the website. It would certainly help us build our audience of you could let your friends know about the website and ask them to tell their friends.
I’ve been looking at the website statistics during our first week. By far the most viewed individual page (other than the Home Page and main section pages) was Dr. David McCartney’s People page. There was a rush of activity on this page right from the first day (Monday, 25 September). I suspect that at least part of this activity was due to David telling colleagues and friends about the website. Thank you, David.
And I would like to thank David again for writing about Recovery Voices on his excellent Recovery Review blog on Friday, 29 September.
If you haven’t seen it yet, please check out our Welcome blog post, which is now placed as our first blog post on a second page.
Tomorrow, I’ll be posting three Stories relating to my Recovery Voices colleague Wulf Livingston: Hedonistic Drink & Drug Use, Learning From Lifeline, and Seeding Recovery in North Wales.
The photograph is from my favourite UK city and a place that has a thriving recovery community… Edinburgh.