Well it has been extremely busy at Totally Locally this week.

After looking putting up all of the inquiries that we have had onto our blackboard we have had over 50 towns interested in finding out more about Totally Locally with most of them progressing and moving forward.

This mean that we have had to streamline processes (thank you Totally Locally Sam and Jane!) so that we can keep track and keep towns moving who want Totally Locally. What this means practically is that the more towns come on board the more there are new ideas in the mix for events, marketing, poster, you name it…it is great to see people in one town using other town ideas and vice versa. I am sure that we will update you on how Leek is looking at Sunday opening and visiting Hebden Bridge for ideas, etc.

From a practical point of view the main Totally Locally website has changed and should be much more inspirational and easy to navigate.

Today we added a £5 Effect Calculator onto the main site so that anyone can work out the effect for the population of their towns/area. For the techies it will even go into an iFrame so other people can put it on their sites if they want to.

Add to that the fact that change of use planning permission has been granted for the first Totally Locally shop to be sited at Dean Clough in Halifax and things are very seat of the pants/exciting at the moment here.

Well now that the strains of Auld Lang Syne are a distant memory, work has returned to normal at Totally Locally Towers.

This feel we are working heavily on the strategy for the next 12 months in terms of giving Towns even more options in terms of engaging with the public, finding their fantastic independent shops and business and promoting all the great things that re going on.

We are currently in the process of drafting our response to the Portas Review, which is interesting because we have been doing a lot of the things that she has recommended in the last 2 and half years. The nice thing is that most of it has been done from the ground up i.e. by people, shopkeepers and business owners rather than being parachuted in…and our experience tells us this is what makes the town more successful when the buy in is both from the public and the businesses.

As soon as we have done we will post our response up on the site as well.

The totally Locally Shops project is moving forward with the pace of a snowball rolling down a hill, getting ever bigger and just as exciting. You can expect to see more on the Shops blog, and on the site as well.

Other ideas we in the process of working on are Totally Locally Offers, a forum (our Natter site) to discuss opinions and a fair bit of other stuff.

Just a quick update for now. TL Nigel

Lots of work going into the Calderdale site today, before it makes the big split and gets a new site for each separate town…exciting stuff!

Kerri is going to be updating a lot of hidden gems that have been waiting in the sidelines for their chance to shine. Big features coming up for the Piece Hall and the wonderful Calderdale Markets, watch this space.

Chris and Nigel are working hard on making the website even better, Chris using the right side of his brain and Nigel his left, so it seems like brilliant teamwork to produce the bestest most fantastical website ever seen… fingers crossed anyway…

And Sam’s having a nice day off from Totally Locally Towers so hopefully the rain isn’t dampening her spirits!

Well it’s been fairly straightforward but we have decided to move our more frequent Totally Locally Towers Blog from our old Tumblr site to here under our WordPress Company site as we found that we were spending most of our time in WordPress and weren’t updating the old blog site as much as we could.

We hope that this one will be updated more often with snippets from Facebook and the daily goings on in the office so you can gain an insight into what we are thinking and doing whilst waiting for some more Big News or Official News to drop.

For instance today has seen a large amount of work on Ampthill by Kerri and Sam, Chris has been speaking with CAMRA and running around like the proverbial fly and I have been to see the proposed site for the first Totally Locally Shop…which we will be agreeing to Heads of Agreement tomorrow…so that is pretty exciting.

And the picture to represent this…well as it is late I have “borrowed it” and will happily promote one of our Hidden Gems “The Heart Gallery” in Hebden Bridge. It is called “The Social Housing Shortage ltd edition screenprint” link http://heartgalleryblog.wordpress.com/