Our story
Green Durham began as a project, ran by Transition Durham, aiming to merge their website with the sites of Durham Local Food and The North East Permaculture Network.
The aim was to provide a single site to help people find sustainable businesses, local food providers and community groups from around County Durham and the wider northeast.
The website launched at the beginning of December 2020 and currently lists around 300 groups and organisations covering over 70 categories. The focus is on organisations serving people living around County Durham. Exceptions are made for the interesting and unique which results in some places from Yorkshire, Cumbria and the Scottish borders, also being included.
Categories include a wide variety of local food producers and retailers; Community Gardens, Woodland and Orchards; Campaign groups and initiatives helping with everything from reducing food waste to fixing your bike.
The next step for Green Durham is to become a Community Interest Company which will allow us to further develop the website and organise related events.
Our advice
We wanted to minimise our impact in our choice of website host. So the selection of the hosting company included factors such as ethical policy, renewable energy and a commitment to running efficient data centres.
We also wanted a UK-based host, partly to simplify regulation and support but also to minimise the effective distance (hops), over the internet, to most of our users.
Our metrics
We get some useful stats on visitors to the website but, as the Billy Bragg lyric goes, "Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted". So we also base things on engagement with users through contact forms, email groups and occasional surveys.
