• July 1997 - I wrote a basic website for my small business in Cockermouth Instinct Training Ltd, and added a few pages to this stating what a nice place Cockermouth was, in the hope that potential customers would come to visit us, rather than expecting us to visit them.

  Information consisted of the contents of leaflets from the local Tourist Information Centre, together with photos that I had taken.

  Statistics for the site showed a much larger number of page visits to the Cockermouth pages than the business pages, which prompted me to look carefully to see what information there was about Cockermouth on the Internet. Finding very little, I decided to write more extensively about the town as a general public spirited offering.

  The site was a subfolder (cm) of the Company website, which was hosted by Netbenefit.

• March 1998 - other areas added covering about 30 miles around Cockermouth - ie Keswick, Ambleside, Penrith, Carlisle, the West Coast from Maryport through Workington, Whitehaven, St Bees, Sellafield to Ravenglass. This was hosted in subfolder (ti) of the Company website - www.instinct-training.co.uk/ti/.

  Later that year I started getting charged by the hosting company for excessive traffic - too many people viewing the website. So I moved the site to btinternet, who were advertising their services as free from excessive usage charges, and with no limit to the website space on offer. The size of the site was now about 50Mb. The address was www.btinternet.com/~lake.district and this and constituent pages were linked to from many other sites.

• Sept 1999 - all photos rescanned to a slightly better quality than the original scan.

• Oct 1999 - National Trust section added - with photos and descriptions of the landscape tours, and a semi-official recognition of what I was doing.

• November 1999 - joined a variety of webrings - for Cumbria, castles, industrial history, etc, and set up a new webring for historic buildings.

• Feb 2000 - bought the domain name visitcumbria.com, after inspiration from the internet company Tumpline in Longtown, Carlisle.

• March 2000 - Joined the Open Directory as a volunteer editor, and removed all links from my site to external websites other than featured tourist attractions. Some 3000 links were added to the Directory - see Open Directory categories for Cumbria.

• March 2001 - foot and mouth section started after major problems in Cumbria caused tourism to be discouraged, and potential visitors needing information from all sides of the political spectrum. At its peek, this section was receiving about 1000 hits a day.

• June 2001 - BT decided to reduce the webspace available to their customers to 20MB - at the peak of the foot and mouth crisis, making it impossible for me to update the site - each page I updated disappeared! So I quickly needed to find another hosting company - with a requirement of a large webspace, no excess traffic costs, and not too expensive. Hostonce in Australia was the one I chose, and with whom the site was hosted until March 2006.

• December 2001 added footer leading to a general comments/contact page, fonts, and restyled the page layout.

• March 2002 - bought Nikon Coolpix 950 camera, and have used that to take digital pictures since.

• September 2003 - Pages relating to historically interesting buildings not open to the public, but viewable from the road, have been removed after several complaints from the owners.

• January 2004 - Started adding links to Amazon for any books I mentioned. This is the only way I can get any revenue for this site, which is expensive to maintain and update. So if you like this site and would like to see it continue to be expanded and improved - buy a book.

• July 2004 - working through the site - tidying up where necessary, replacing pictures where I have suitable new pictures, and redesigning the menus leading to the information pages.

• August 2004 - bought a Nikon Coolscan negative scanner, and started rescanning to a much higher quality the film based pictures, starting with oldest first.

• October/November 2004 - added over 100 aerial photos by Simon Ledingham, taken from his gyrocopter.

• Feb 2005 - started learning php/mysql for my business needs,and used this knowldge to add features to this site (see below).

• May 2005 - added database of grid references - and a feature on all the individual place pages to list nearby places of interest.

• November 2005 - added a page counter to every page to log statistics. Now I can see which are the most and least viewed pages.

• December 2005 - added a guestbook feature, soon be be modified as I started getting flooded with ads for drugs.

• December - added the google maps feature - to give a scrollable and zoomable map for every town/village. In due course I will add all places of interest as pointers on the map.

• Jan 2006 - statistics showed the most viewed pages (in general) were those relating to the towns and villages - so effort was put into expanding this (21 villages added in Jan-Feb)

  Started adding links to Wikipedia pages. I also created a page at VisitCumbria which contains links to pages relevant to Cumbria such as haematite, steel making, anhydrite mining, wind turbines, John Ruskin, McVitie’s Biscuits, etc.

• 2005 - 2006 - many more aerial photos added, including picture sequences for the River Eden, Pennine villages, Carlisle Settle steam trip, Cumbrian West Coast, and Hadrian's Wall.

• March 2006 - decided to move the hosting from Hostonce in Melbourne Australia, to Positive Internet in London (where all my work websites are now hosted).

• Jan - June 2007 - Did a major rewrite and expansion of the Cockermouth website, which involved setting up various databases for accommodation, places to eat, events, etc. I decided to use the general listing and detail pages, along with the design concept, to add a new style to VisitCumbria, and also to create listings of accommodation and places to eat.

  A database was built from many sources (April 2008 - 2400 entries) - trying to identify all accommodation offerings, then these places were contacted inviting facility information for no charge, or a detailed page with pictures for £40 per year. I got very few replies to either of these offers - which makes the listings less useful.

• Jan - Apr 2008 - Modernisation to the new style continues, and I am adding google maps to many pages, including the 'places nearby' pages.

Despite several other large websites being created covering similar ground to that of this site, I continue to maintain and add to the site as I get time. Julian Thurgood, April 2008.

I would like to acknowledge the help and encouragement given to me over the years by

• Simon Ledingham for the many aerial photos he has taken from his gyrocopter.
• Matthew Emmott for photos of the South Lakeland area
• Mike Faulkner - for photos
• Jan Fialkowski - for photos
• Nicola Didsbury - for photos
• Peter Donaghy - for walks and walk photos
• Malcolm Minshaw - for church photos

Also special thanks to

• Tony Richards from Coniston, and
• Ann Bowker from Keswick, who make daily trips into the Lake Distict taking photos for their websites, many of which I have used on this site.
• Roger Savage - for photos - including aerial ones
• Jonathan Webb - for aerial photos
• David Hall - for photos
• Andrew Leaney - for photos

See the list of changes to this website.

Julian Thurgood has been a computer programmer for the last 40 years. His computer experience started in 1968 at IBM at their Laboratories in Hursley, Hampshire, England, working with an IBM System/360.

During the early 1980's he spent several years developing a medical records system in the MUMPS programming language, to run on a Digital PDP-11 mini-computer.

Since 1991 he has been a partner in a Computer-based training Company, Instinct Training based in Cumbria, (the English Lake District).

He was an editor (editall) of the Open Directory Project.

His current project (2006-2008) is to convert 15 years of training courses to run on-line - using HTML, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS and Macromedia Flash. See for more information.