Morning! Here’s a quick round-up of what I’ve been getting stuck into this week.
It’s been a “build something useful and see if it holds together” kind of week, mostly around the local news site I run as a side project (Cheltenham Times), plus a bit of tidying up on my own business pages. Here’s the interesting bits.
A brand new sports section, built end to end
The biggest project this week was giving Cheltenham Times a proper sports section — Cheltenham Town FC, racing, rugby, athletics and running all got their own home on the site, with a new homepage feature and menu link pointing people there.
The clever bit isn’t really the pages themselves, it’s what happens behind the scenes. When a match finishes, the result gets picked up automatically, a report gets published, and it’s posted straight out to social media — no one has to remember to do it. I’ve also set up a weekly check that goes looking for upcoming fixtures so nothing gets missed.
If you run a business with anything that follows a predictable pattern — a weekly report, a regular update to customers, a recurring bit of admin — this is exactly the kind of thing that’s worth automating. You don’t need a whole new sports section to benefit from the same idea; even “check X every Monday and tell me if something’s changed” can save a surprising amount of time.
Sorting out how the site actually reads
Alongside the new sports pages, I ended up fixing a few things that were quietly annoying — page titles that were displaying oddly, missing photos on event pages, and a sports category page that had no proper introduction for readers or Google. All small things individually, but they add up to a site that looks and works properly, which matters more than people think for how trustworthy a site feels.
Digging into what local businesses actually want from news
I also spent some time researching what small and medium business owners in Cheltenham and Gloucestershire actually want from a local news site — as opposed to what a news site might assume they want. Turns out it’s less “here’s a story” and more “here’s something useful I can act on”: practical cost and tax information, who’s moving into town, planning applications that might affect them, that sort of thing.
It’s a good reminder that whatever you’re building — a website, a service, a newsletter — it pays to stop and check you’re solving the problem your audience actually has, not the one you assumed they had.
A tidy-up on my own “AI Coach” page
Closer to home, I gave my own AI Coach page a once-over. It had turned into a wall of text, so I shortened the paragraphs, added a simple three-step diagram (listen, build, stay), and made the key points easier to spot at a glance. If you’ve got a website page that people bounce off quickly, there’s a good chance it’s simply asking them to read too much before they get to the point — worth a look at your own.
What’s next
Next week I’ll be following up on the sports section’s first proper live result, and carrying on with the Cheltenham business content plans.
If any of this sounds familiar — a report you dread writing every week, a page on your site nobody finishes reading, or wondering whether AI could actually take some admin off your plate rather than just answering questions — drop me a line. I’m always happy to have a chat about what a sensible first step might look like for your business.
