Tag: Sue Fielder

Chaotic Scenes!

June 30, 2012 / / 2 Comments

No, the title does not refer to our ‘Go-Live’ event yesterday, which went off, as we’d expected, seamlessly. We are now all on the new site and you cannot see the old one. Many thanks to the two main ‘movers and shakers’ in this process, Sue Fielder of Open Sandwich, and Anthony Thornley of Blue Ant. You have probably by now sussed that you can comment directly on these posts through the site, rather than having to email the Secretaries. I would love your feedback, so please do comment if you have any ideas for improvements or can see any issues. I cannot promise, as they used to say on Cornflake packet competition entry forms “to enter into correspondence” with you, especially if this is taken up wholesale, but I will reply to any that I think are appropriate. You can, of course, still email the Trust using CambriaTrustSecretary@live.co.uk.

QDJP flotilla. Photo by Bruce Richardson

Meanwhile I loved this shot by Chairman Bruce Richardson of the chaotic scenes on the Thames during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant of the flotilla, I am guessing taken from the deck of Cambria. You may not be able to see this in the reduced-size reproduction I have to use on the website, but the worried expressions on the faces of the two police boat guys at the bottom of the shot, and the guys in the pilot-cutter (bottom left) as they crane their necks every which way looking for possible problems between the mad-cap boaters speaks loudly of “What have we let ourselves in for now!???” Excellent. Nice, one Bruce.

SB Sara and the Fielders, Picture from Sue Fielder's collection

Sue Fielder and SB Sara

June 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bob Fielder and Sister; Picture from Sue Fielder's Collection

With just today and tomorrow to go, we are heading into the closing stages of ‘Go-Live’ on the new website and our fond farewell to Sue Fielder and the team at Open Sandwich, the providers of the old site. Sue has sent me a rather nice email saying “(Director) Dave as he was then) may have told you but one of the reasons he chose us for the Cambria website development was because Bob’s Grandfather Thomas Fielder was the mate and Bob’s Great Uncle Charles Fielder was the Master of the spritsail barge, the Sara.

SB Sara and the Fielders, Picture from Sue Fielder's collection

Between the wars they carried grain from Harwich to South Wales and coke from South Wales into Tilbury. They raced the Sara after the war to around 1953 (they won lots of races). In 1951 they were at the Great Exhibition in London – Bob and his sister where on the barge – see one of the photos – they look a bit cold!” Sue also sends us all “Best Wishes”

She encloses these obviously very old and treasured, scanned in photos of SB Sara and of Bob and his Sister. Thank you very much for that, Sue. Sara was, of course, a very famous racing barge with a fine string of win credits as one of the “Racing Horlocks” all through from 1903, 1907, 1928 and the 30’s, as well as post-war.

Old Cambria Trust website stats for 2012 — Old website stats screen grab

Stats from ‘old’ site

June 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Readers may know that we intend to close the ‘old’ Cambria Website down and transfer from the much loved and highly respected providers (Open Sandwich Design) to the new base here, Blue Ant. This is no reflection on Open Sandwich. They have done us proud. You can see from the screen-grab today which I have taken from the old site that we have been well received there with 20 to 30 thousand hits a month (peaking at 55k for launch month last year).

We have now moved from a “Restoration” project, to an on-going business, running a barge for profit, managing a charter business and developing a shop selling Cambria-related ‘stuff’ . It has become appropriate therefore to seek a new provider and this we have found in Anthony at Blue Ant Ltd who are based in the old Pollocks “Sideways Launch” shipyard in the Upper Brents in Faversham. Their website is on http://blue-ant-design.co.uk/

This is the new Cambria Website, (http://www.cambriabargecharter.co.uk/) so you can see that we are ‘up there’ but is still under construction. You are welcome to come and have a look and please feel free to comment but the way these things work is that this ‘prototype’ version is posted for us all to play and train on till we at the Cambria Trust and the Team at Blue Ant are happy with it, and then we ‘go live’ and launch a brand new copy of the prototype site loaded with all the new stuff but also the archive files (for example my 4 years of blog) from the old provider. While the ‘Brand New Copy’ is constructed and tested, the ‘new website’ will be off air for a couple of days and you will only be able to see the old one, www.cambriatrust.org.uk .

Old website stats screen grab

This new site is planned to go live properly on 29th of this month (Friday week) and I know the Team at Blue Ant are keen to get the search-able aspects turned on so that we can be found by Google and other search engines. The hope is that everyone can find us here and will continue to read us regularly. It will be interesting to see how quickly we can get back up to the 20k and 30k figures shown here.