Accy Observer online edition , obituaries

[steeljack]

Not sure which thread to post this in .....but I guess the folks at the Obsever check this site out now and again for news items .... Anyway here goes , I guess its a sign of age when you find yourself checking the obits to see who you have out-lived , and I'm sure lots of "maturing" expat folks check the Observer out now and then for local news from home , at one time the paper had a button where you could click and it would give you the weeks 'births, deaths and marriages ' this seems to been have discontinued either that or folks have ceased passing away, having babies and getting wed ,now its just a button for paid memorials, so if any member of the Accrington Observer staff happen to come across this thread please bring it to your editors notice .

Any other Accy-webbers who live outside the local area and miss this feature please add a posting so the folks at the Observer know I'm not a morbid nutter and I'm not trying to affect your local sales figures
Thanks

[Lampman]

Steeljack you can contact the editor Mervyn Kay via the Observer site.Though I don't know how much control he has over the web content,as the former family owned paper is now a member of a much larger concern

[WillowTheWhisp]

I can see how that could be an important page for ex-pats though - maybe the answer will be to get someone to send you the newspaper by post. Do they till have cheap rates for newspapers?

[junetta]

I agree with Steeljack. I brought this subject up a couple of months ago because I missed the way that the Obituary section was displayed. At one time there was a pic plus a small resume of the person's life, then the pics disappeared.

I must admit that shortly after I mentioned it the pics came back. Happen this means that comments are noted.

[US Angel]

As a Ex Pat I would read ALL sections of the Observer (even the Obits) do not like the way it is done now.

[Lee Swettenham]

Originally Posted by steeljack

Not sure which thread to post this in .....but I guess the folks at the Obsever check this site out now and again for news items .... Anyway here goes , I guess its a sign of age when you find yourself checking the obits to see who you have out-lived , and I'm sure lots of "maturing" expat folks check the Observer out now and then for local news from home , at one time the paper had a button where you could click and it would give you the weeks 'births, deaths and marriages ' this seems to been have discontinued either that or folks have ceased passing away, having babies and getting wed ,now its just a button for paid memorials, so if any member of the Accrington Observer staff happen to come across this thread please bring it to your editors notice .

Any other Accy-webbers who live outside the local area and miss this feature please add a posting so the folks at the Observer know I'm not a morbid nutter and I'm not trying to affect your local sales figures
Thanks

Hello all - I edit the Observer website (as well as the sites of all the other titles that this conglomerate of ours has these days!).

This thread's been brought to my attention so I thought I'd pay a visit to explain a bit more about the new Family Notices section.

First things first - you were all familiar with the old-style Obituaries section, but I should point out that births and marriages have never appeared on the site. We only ever carried the Obituaries that featured in the editorial page of tributes each week.

I've been quite surprised that a few people haven't spotted the new Family Notices section on the site, there are links to it all over the home page! On the left-hand navigation list it is even listed as 'Family Notices (Obituaries)' just to make it clear that this is where the Obituaries are now.

Yes, the Obituaries from the paper do go in this new section, they never disappeared - people haven't stopped dying yet! And we know how popular this is, both in the paper and on the website, so we'd never remove it.

With the new Family Notices section we wanted to improve on what we had there before - it's a bit more than just a button for paid memorials, by that token before it was just a button for free memorials! ...

Let me explain the changes ...

The section actually does contain the tributes from the Obituaries page in the Ob - links to these tributes are seen scrolling at the bottom of the Family Notices page under 'other features', and in the list of notices at the top of the page (they are the ones with 'featured guest book' in brackets after the name).

All the Obituaries from each week's Observer page are added to the section.

But in this section you can now also see the death notices, in memoriam and acknowledgements that appear in the Ob's classified section. You never had access to these on the old Obituaries section of the site.

The new system also allows you to leave messages in guestbooks for each person listed, or create your own tributes to the people with music and more pictures if you wish.

There are other bells and whistles too, like searches for notices and the chance to look at notices from some of our neighbouring areas.

Take a good look around it, and once you're acquainted with where everything is I'm sure that you'll see that nothing has been removed from the old service -that's all there, we've just added more for you to see.

And yes, the plan is for this service to be extended to births, marriages and other 'happy notices' soon.

I realise that it's quite a change and sometimes it can take a while to find you're way around and get used to it, but I hope that clears up any confusion there might be over it.

Cheers
Lee

[steeljack]

Lee , thanks for the speedy assistance , much appreciated