Months of hard work came to fruition this week when a cross section of the community of Athlone welcomed the new look Athlone portal www.athlone.ie at an exclusive preview launch held in the Civic Centre this week. The new look site will go live this weekend. This is the fourth version of athlone.ie since it was first launched in December 2001.
Cllr Frankie Keena, chairman of Athlone eCom Ltd, project management company of athlone.ie, opened the proceedings and recapped on the birth of the company when Athlone Town Council identified the need to develop a quality portal website for Athlone. He expressed thanks to the town clerk, John Walsh and the elected members of the council for their foresight, investment, and commitment to the set-up and future development of a website for the town. He went on to explain that Athlone eCom Ltd was then formed by Athlone Town Council to promote and market the town and environs at local, regional, national, and international level by the provision of information on a portal site under the domain name www.athlone.ie which was first launched in December 2001.
Athlone eCom is a not for profit company and is always looking for resources and support of the local community. Athlone eCom generates a certain amount of revenue from local businesses advertising on the directory but the company is still very dependent on sponsorship to keep striving forward and promoting the town online.
Cllr Keena stated this new version of the website “is most timely, with the new focus on marketing Athlone as a growth centre”. He went on to say that “with national unemployment figures now hitting 420,000 that there is now more than ever a need to have an interactive portal website promoting and marketing this fine town of ours. We need to work together and identify ways of creating jobs in Athlone and the resource that is available through Athlone.ie should be utilised to the full.”
Carmel Duffy, project manager, gave a brief overview and demonstration of the new site features.
She said that in planning this fourth version the directors and project team “wanted to not only change the look and improve functionality but also to use a different back-end or cms that would allow us greater flexibilty to tweak the design, add new features and generate more interactive elements on the site”.
Please make contact with the athlone.ie team if you have content or images that you would like them to add to the site, or are interested in discussing the best business advertising option for you. They are based in Athlone Civic Centre. For more information call (090 ) 6442161 or email [email protected].
