Building Cheltenham Open Data - why tools beat blog posts

Cheltenham Open Data is now on Version 2.0 – a design refresh on the front end, and a fair bit of unglamorous work behind the scenes to improve scalability as the site grows. Why I started with tools, not articles One of the earliest lessons from running websites, including the first iteration of this site covering football statistics to 5 million page views and 180,000 twitter followers - the glory days - is that news articles or blog posts alone aren’t enough to build something people come back to. There are millions of blogs out there, all chasing Google and now the AI crawlers, fighting over the same long-tail keywords and tiny niches for scraps of traffic. If you’re building a local website, people need a reason to return. That means building with data and keeping it genuinely current rather than publishing another opinion piece that goes stale in a week. The first tool: fuel prices The first real test of this idea was fuel prices. I’d seen that the UK Government had opened a…