Visit Henley website is worst I’ve used, says town manager

A WEBSITE designed to promote Henley is set to be revamped.

Visit Henley was launched in 2014 to encourage tourism and increase footfall in the town.

But the town council, which owns the domain name, has not been updating it.

Daisy Smith, the council’s communications officer, told a meeting of the council’s town and community committee that officers had found the website’s host platform difficult to use.

She suggested contracting Breathe4U to redesign the site at a cost of £5,990.

But Councillor Kellie Hinton was sceptical of the idea, saying other companies, such as Higgs Group, publisher of the Henley Standard and www.henleystandard.co.uk, already provided a what’s on service for events in the town.

She said: “I think it is a chain around the neck and I think calling it an asset is polishing a turd and it should be removed.

“To have multiple things in the town there is absolutely no need for. I would be in favour of completely binning it. Do we really need to spend £6,000 doing what they’re doing?”

Cllr Hinton said that previous attempts to update the website hadn’t got anywhere because it took up too much time.

She said: “The man hours just aren’t there; the skill set perhaps hasn’t been there.

“I don’t understand how we are going to overcome these same issues. We are going to do the same thing that at least three other people in the town are already doing and try to overcome the issues from before. We don’t have any extra staff.”

Ms Smith replied that the council’s information centre was now more “tech savvy” and that part of the centre staff’s job was to understand what was going on in the town.

Councillor Glen Lambert, who chairs the committee, asked why information wasn’t being updated on the website currently. Ms Smith replied: “It is an incredibly old site and very hard to work out how to do it. It’s not WordPress and you can never find anything to do anything and can’t find half the stuff.”

Paul Carey, the town centre manager, said: “I had a recent unfortunate experience of having to use the Visit Henley website.

“It was pretty much the worst site I’ve ever tried to adapt and use. Uploading an image takes hours. It’s unusable in its current form.

“However, the Visit Henley URL is very widely used and populated; it gets so many visitors and when they get there it’s impossible to use.

“My view is we need to be curating Henley. If we give it to someone else who has ulterior agendas we are not curating our own story.

“We need to be putting out our own images, telling the story how we want to tell it, not how someone else wants to tell it.”

Councillor Sarah Kandiah asked what the objective of the website was, adding: “Is there a unique selling point to maximise?” Ms Smith replied: “There is no other agenda apart from making the town the best it possibly can be. It also isn’t a commercial venture.

“I think it’s nice that we can promote the tiny businesses and the massive ones without an agenda of getting sponsorship or income or something from them.

“That’s what makes us different. It’s our job to shout from the rooftops that Henley’s great.”

Councillor Hinton said she had been persuaded to support the proposal but added: “I think it will be a challenge.”

The committee agreed to recommend to the full council that the website be revamped at a cost of up to £6,000.

Meanwhile, a tourism alliance has been revived.

An initial group comprising the River & Rowing Museum, Brakspear, the Fairmile Vineyard and the Relais Henley hotel are now working together to promote each other.

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