Scilly News is maintained by Steve Duncan (http://www.bishoprock.net/). Recently, most articles have been written by Beth Hilton.

History

Scilly News was set up by developing DuncanTV, a local web site with an aim to keep track of news from the Islands which would keep locals, expats and visitors in touch with the happenings.

When Steve Duncan from St Mary’s and Julian Pearce from St Agnes moved from the Islands to go to college, they developed the site into the current Scilly News. Scilly News was born on 1 February, 2001.

In Summer 2003, Issy Taylor, Nathalie Gardener and Harry Legg joined the team at Scilly News. In the summer of 2004, Beth Hilton and Leonie McFarlane joined. In late 2004, Issy Taylor went on to work for BBC Radio Cornwall.

Gratefully Supported By…

Scilly News is a non-profit organisation. This means we have relied on sponsorship to keep it going.

The Isles of Scilly Museum awarded Scilly News with the Maclaren Award. Their generous financial support meant that were able to add new features to the site, by upgrading our host and purchasing web cam equipment.

Scilly Online and Colborne Trophies sponsored the web cam, until it ceased transmission in January 2002.

From July 2002 to August 2007, the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company’s ‘Isles of Scilly Travel’ sponsored Scilly News. This sponsorship was used to host Scilly News, and will go into promoting Scilly News, the Scillonian Cross and the Isles of Scilly.

The Scillonia Digital Workshop has also given us valuable support.

Hosting

Scilly News started by being hosted by our ISP, BT Internet. After an award from the local museum, we upgraded to a WebFusion server in order to use ASP, later replaced by PHP and MySQL. We then found a cheaper host in the USA called GoDaddy. In August 2007, we moved again to DreamHost (USA), as they provide greener hosting.

Reputation

In the late summer of 2001, Scilly News was awarded the ‘My Hometown Quality Web Site Award’.

Scilly News is now recognised around the World. Though the majority of visits are from the UK, we do get a lot of visitors from Australia, New Zealand (popular places for expats) and the Netherlands (our main foreign pilot gig competitor), along with many others.

We gain about 5000 visitors a month. That’s a new person every 9 minutes.

On 20 August 2002, Scilly News received the Golden Web Award - ‘In recognition of creativity, integrity and excellence on the Web’ - or so they say.

Taglines

‘From the Western Rocks to the Eastern Isles’ is an unregistered trademarks of Scilly News. ‘Scilly News’ and ‘Severecci’ are unregistered trademarks of http://www.severecci.net/.

The Scillonian Cross is not a logo of Scilly News.

Banner Image

The banner image contains: the Scillonian Cross flag, a design for an IOS flag as decided by our readers; the central rock is Scilly Rock, photographed by Richard Pearce, http://www.scillywebcam.com/.