Teenager wins school competition to design town’s new website (From The Bolton News)

Teenager wins school competition to design town’s new website

4:10pm Saturday 18th July 2009 in

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A TEENAGER is set to put Westhoughton on the virtual map after creating a state-of-the-art website for her home town.

Amy Longmore won a competition organised by Westhoughton Town Council to launch them into cyberspace.

Members decided they wanted to replace their traditional paper town guide with an internet site, to bring the council into the 21st century.

They teamed up with Westhoughton High School and David Slater, head of information technology, who agreed Year 13 pupils could work on the project as part of their ICT A level.

In all, 13 students designed websites, which were presented to town councillors, and 18-year-old Amy’s was chosen as the best. It will be used by the town council as its official website.

Amy, of Alexandria Drive, Westhoughton, said: “I am really pleased I’ve won. I was quite proud of the website. I spent quite a lot of time on it, but I enjoyed doing it as well.

“I learned quite a lot about the town that I didn’t know, even though I’ve lived here for 18 years, including all about the Pretoria Pit disaster.”

Amy’s winning website includes a video about Westhoughton and lots of photographs.

There is also a page about the town council, another about places of interest, the history of the town, famous people from Westhoughton, details about local businesses and a map.

Mr Slater said: “It was an excellent project for the students. They were creating a real website, which brought the whole thing to life. They could get out into the community and take photos and videos.

“I’m very pleased Cllr Brennan put forward the idea.”

Cllr Pat Brennan said: “All the websites were of a very high standard. It was hard to decide the winner, but we had to go with Amy’s in the end.”

He said he hoped the website would go live in the autumn.