Lyneham Village Online Seven Years Old Today
19th January 2009
Lyneham's very own village website is celebrating seven busy years online this week. We've been talking to Lyneham Village Online's webmaster Andy Humm about the success of his site.

Andy Humm, a former aircraft engineer stationed at RAF Lyneham twice, during his long and illustrious RAF career, witnessed many service personnel arrive and leave the busy Wiltshire airbase, home of the C130 Hercules aircraft. During his last tour at RAF Lyneham, working in the engineering operations cell, which is the logistics and pivotal centre of all the maintenance and aircraft tasks carried out on the airbase and worldwide, he was frequently asked many pretty basic questions by visiting crews, servicemen and women posted in; Where are this nearest shops? What can I do with the children? Where is the nearest train station, bed and breakfast or hotel? What's going on? Where is the nearest garage or takeaway?, etc. With this in mind, he got an inspiration to produce an online guide to answer these repeated essential lifestyle questions.

His first website attempt was a visitors guide for the many personnel passing through the air base, knowing he had spend many long hours researching the information for the guide, Andy decided to expand the site and involve the local community too. At the time of retiring from the air force after 27 years service, he started planning Lyneham Wiltshire & Beyond, the former name of this website. Burning many gallons of midnight oil he came up with a website that has ended up becoming a very useful portal for the community.

The main objective, which has not changed, was to provide the community with an interactive portal - with the information you need in one place. If the information is not readily available in Lyneham Village Online, it could be on one of the many thousands of links provided. At the last count, there was over 7570 of them! The website has its own search engine too.

Andy said during the website inception seven years ago this week, "I believe that a good website is never finished, and this one is only in it's infancy. I have numerous ideas up my sleeves and plan to introduce new themes as and when I get time."

Andy has lived in Lyneham on his second tour since 1996 and retired from the Royal Air Force in 2002 to settle in an extremely peaceful and friendly community. His initial ties with this fairly large village started in the early 80's when he was posted to RAF Lyneham, just before the Falkland Island war. After spending three very enjoyable years in the North Wilts village, he was posted away, knowing one day he was going to return. Being very privileged to return in the mid 90's, he made plans to settle here purchasing a beautiful house on the outskirts of the village, overlooking the rolling hills of Preston Vale.

Within a few months of the website launch, there were numerous positive plaudits being sent to the webmaster acknowledging the idea and the ease of use of the new village website. After four weeks of the site being online it received its first recognition and gained "The Golden Web Award" for February 2002, in recognition of creativity, integrity and design. It was great news considering the site had only been up and running for a month. Within the first year being online, the website was awarded more globally recognised web design awards and the most notable was being polled third as the UK Village Website of the Year, an achievement Andy still is very proud of.

Andy said, "Website awards are a great way to recognise talented individual and team efforts in outstanding website development. The continued effort and painstaking work that has been put into this website, has been acknowledged and we are proud to have received the awards"

Statistics show people regularly use the site from all over the world, we now have on average around 10,000 visitors a day, primarily from the UK, USA and the Middle East, peaking in February 2005 to well over 45,000 hits a day, a sad time during the tragic loss of Hercules XV179, shot down in Iraq. Many of the visitors at that time were in search of information about the Hilton 22 crew and passing on their condolences to the family, friends and loved ones.

Today, we are still covering news articles of the village, the service interaction with the community, documenting events that become the 'history in the making' of a very busy Wiltshire village. From time to time, Andy spends a few hours walking around the village with his digital camera, taking pictures of the facets of the village from different angles recording the way the village looks. It is amazing to see, even in this short timescale, how the face of the village has changed, buildings having extensions, shop owners changing, road alterations and each season brings a different perspective to the village.

Always, armed with his camera, Andy managed to capture two rare moments in the village history. Firstly, the night after we had a heavy snowfall in March 2007, Andy took an amazing picture of St Michael and All Angel's church blanketed with fresh untouched snow and the other capturing the moment of a total lunar eclipse on the Wiltshire airbase, over a parked Hercules aircraft. Andy entered these two photographs into the BBC Wiltshire Wonders of Wiltshire Calendar Competition and the pictures amazed judges, including the editor of the Amateur Photographer magazine, so much that they were both selected as winners to be included on the 2008 BBC Wiltshire Wonders of Wiltshire Calendar.

Asked at the time of the website launch, What do you reckon are the benefits of having a village website? Andy replied "It's environmentally friendly with no printing, paper, storage or delivery costs and it's easily updated - in some cases automatically, as with the interactive events diary. The information is sorted and is kept up-to-date too. If it becomes stale, we can remove it at no extra cost. Archived info and news also serves as reminders on what has gone on in Lyneham in the past." In fact this archiving or storage of events has been an important part of Andy's latest agenda with the website, with the regular updating expanding history section of the site.

Painstaking research has allowed the website to gain quite a well documented history of the village, its development from early agricultural early days to what it is today. A major stumbling block on the village timeline, has been trying to find information and pictures of a former manor building in the village. It was the Lyneham Court building that previously stood on the current RAF Lyneham base, at that time occupied by the Fry family. The large building was surrounded by a large moat, orchards and a few ponds and which was sadly demolished by the Air Ministry in 1939, to make way for the expansion of the air force station during the Second World War. If any one has any information, especially memories or photographs of Lyneham Court, Andy would be very interested to hear from you to share these bygones.

Well, with seven years online quietly being celebrated, a milestone that is proudly acknowledged, over 10,432 visitors browsed the Lyneham Village Online yesterday, work goes on as normal for Andy, maintaining, reviewing and changing this award winning website keeping it up-to-date, interactive and more importantly safe and for the many visitors. If you have any constructive ideas about the website, our ears are always listening to fresh innovative ideas.

Just as a note for the future, we are planning to hold another presentation about the Celebration of Village Life, outling the history of our village, captured with many old postcards, photographs, memories and bygones. The last presentation, over two years ago, was organised to coincide with the September Harvest festival, sharing many agricultural aspects within the community. The two-day event was such a success, raising lots of money for St Michael and All Angels church funds.

We have started initial plans to repeat a similar event for this year. We hope to bring an event in the format as a 'bring and share village memories' idea, where we would like to see many villagers, past and present share bygones, photographs and memories of what life was like in the community. We aim to share these experiences and village times by hopefully get them documented for all to see in our history section. Keep an eye on the village diary for more details.