The website NorfolkBroads.com was relaunched yesterday. It provides the largest and most advanced Tourism directory for the East of England. The web site provides specialist coverage of Norfolk and the Norfolkbroads.
Providing a quick interface and touch screen ready format for finding Accommodation, Boat hire, boating holidays, cottages and B&B locations in Norfolk and the Norfolk Broads.
Norfolk Broads information now available on youtube, From NorfolkBroads.com
The peaceful Norfolk Broads, National Park lies to the east of the cathedral city of Norwich, with 30 calm, shallow lakes fringed with reeds, alder or willow. They are interlinked by a series of rivers and man-made dykes to form around 200 miles of sailable waterways in serene countryside.
Due to the unique nature of the area, the Norfolk Broads and its slow-moving rivers and silent marshes make for an exquisite place to explore our native wildlife and catch migrating birds that visit the area on route as a respite from their mammoth journey south.
Hickling Broads is the largest of the freshwater lakes and research in the 1950s lead archaeologist’s to believe that it was man made in the medieval times when the locals dug out the peat from the marshland.
The Norfolk Wherry sailing barges were once a famous site, with their shallow keel and huge red sails transporting the local goods from Great Yarmouth up to the city of Norwich along the Broads rivers.
The centre of the Broads is Wroxham, with a local rail and bus link to Norwich and the facility to hire out Broads Cruisers and Sailing Boats on either a daily or holiday basis. Hiring a boat and taking a trip up the river is really the only true way to explore and experience the natural beauty and breath-taking skies of the region.
The broads are mainly a fresh water environment, where the likes of the British Otter population seem to be making a welcome come back because of the quality of the water and the surrounding landscape. The marshland and reed beds amongst the waterways of the Norfolk Broads make the area a happy hunting ground for many kinds of birds. Mosquito repellent is highly recommended during the summer season as the unique flora attracts a variety of insects, dragonflies and butterflies.
The coast is also a well earned rest for migrating birds on route from the north flying to warmer climates in autumn and on their way back in spring. Two migrant waders from the north are the Knot, and the bar-tailed Godwit, which gather in huge flocks on the mud flats on the coastal edges of the Norfolk Broads. A real special treat for all birdwatchers to come and enjoy the amazing range of birds; whilst cruising down the rivers of the Norfolk Broads on a boat.
Information up date from the Broads Authority Team…….
Record numbers of the rare and exotic Swallowtail Butterfly have appeared in the Broads this summer – the first increase in nearly 100 years.
The Swallowtail, Britain’s largest butterfly, draws enthusiasts from all over the UK to the Broads. This year large numbers of Swallowtails have been seen at How Hill National Nature Reserve, Hickling Broad and Strumpshaw Fen from late May until early July and a rare second brood is extending the Swallowtail season into August.
Swallowtails were once widespread across the UK but they are now found only in the Broads and at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire.
The rise is thought to be due to successful fen management over the last 15 years which has resulted in an increase in milk parsley which provides food for the Swallowtail caterpillars.
Numbers declined sharply in the 1920s when the demand for thatch and marsh hay for London cab horses diminished bringing about a decline in the reed and sedge cutting industry. This left the marshes overgrown and neglected. By the 1980s much of the open fen had been lost and milk parsley could not survive in the scrub which meant there was limited food for the caterpillars.
In the late nineties the Broads Authority, a member of the National Park family, set in motion a fen management strategy and together with the Norfolk and Suffolk Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, Natural England, National Trust and private landowners began harvesting the fen and clearing scrub which had been invading the fen since the Second World War. Government funding from agri-environment schemes to landowners has financed much of the work.
Andrea Kelly Head of Conservation at the Broads Authority said ‘This restoration programme is a fantastic demonstration of how public funding is providing magnificent wildlife results for seven million visitors who visit the Broads magical waterland each year. More visitors are saying that they have easily spotted Swallowtails this year.’
Factfile:
· The Swallowtail has a wingspan of up to 9 cm. Its wings are predominantly yellow with dramatic black markings and scalloped edging at the bottom. The British race is the subspecies britannicus, which is slightly smaller and darker than its continental cousin.
· Places to spot Swallowtails are the Broads Authority’s How Hill National Nature Reserve, near Ludham, NWT Hickling Broad and the RSPB’s Strumpshaw Fen.
Yesterday morning we had the opportunity to discuss our business and tourism directory live on air
with future radio, you can listen to the full interview at
Take a look at the following link http://custompostcard.org Really nice video of a holiday on the Norfolk Broads, shows what you can get out of Boat hire on the Norfolk Broads
If you have any great video / images of the Broads, please let me know always on the look out for great content
A great blog for you to read looking at the wildlife on the broads from Steve Routledge
Doing business in Norfolk and Suffolk has it’s own qualities. Often time I feel the rest of the world never really pays attention to us until they need something.
So this week as I got to terms with what as is initially thought was the cataclysmic change from Google of Web history and personalised search.
The reason this had me almost in tears is that if everyone on the web has individual search results based on their previous search history. It would mean an end to producing effective seo for customers. I was particularly angry as Google had this launched very low key just, a brief press release at Christmas.
The effects were not immediate just as the Caffeine update took time to spread across all data centres, so to web history will take time to establish a stable reliable algorithm on every Internet users browser.
The small business user cant help but be put out by this, many in the Norfolk Broads and Suffolk are begining the journey of seo. So to find the rules have changed so quickly is daunting.
It is hard to see web history as anything but an attempt by Google to dilute the effectiveness of organic search and push clients on to pay per click campaigns in order to normalise the effects of personalised search.
This is fine if you have £10,000 plus to invest in PPC each month. But what about the small and medium businesses who have less than £10,000 per annum to invest. As I know many of the businesses in and around the Norfolk & Suffolk Broads do.
The answer at this early stage is to get creative and find means to use the Google system to your own advantage. Performing a “virgin” search with the history deleted yields different results to a search made with the influencing history intact. Google again has been ambiguous about how long or how many searches it will take for the history to become an influence.
One potential answer could be to use reliable directory sites, with good domain age and traffic to present your information try www.norfolbroads.com.
In essence directory sites are one of the earliest forms of personalised search, where visitors are pretty clear about the information they are after and how the want to access it.
Communication will also be a massive part of how to overcome any disadvantage. Use blogs to present information and link with others who are interested in your type of product.This is another form of PPC instead of using hard currency to buy each results, you are using the currency of your own time to invest in building traffic.
As the results of Caffeine and Web history start to become clearer over the coming months i will do my best to keep you up dated, on the possible effects for businesses in and around the Norfolk Broads.