Introducing WME Warwickshire

The WME galleries can announce today the arrival of a new member of the family - WME Warwickshire has been launched with a couple of starter collections

• Warwickshire by Bus - as usual, all new galleries begin with a bus collection. Two photos here showing buses at Nuneaton and Leamington, both good locations to showcase. I especially enjoyed visiting Nuneaton last year, a great place to get photos
• Stratford-upon-Avon Canal - WME Birmingham has a collection showing one end of the canal, and now WME Warwickshire has a collection showing the other. Two photos here as well, both showing Bridge 69 at Bancroft Basin in Stratford. The basin is yet another of my favourite canal locations, and Bridge 69 is one of the reasons I like the basin so much, so I'm pleased to include it
• Exploring Stratford-upon-Avon - Stratford is one of the definitive places that springs to mind when you think of Warwickshire, what with Shakespeare's Birthplace and the River Avon, so what better place could there be to kick off the local collections on the new gallery. Two more photos to start with here, The Pen and Parchment pub, and a view of the building that simply is Stratford, Shakespeare's Birthplace.

Time for action

The launch of WME Warwickshire is a response to a couple of nagging issues behind the scenes at WME. Firstly Warkstest and Saloptest have been sitting on WME1 for months and months going nowhere, and it was about time I did something with the photos. Secondly, there were dead links from the other WME galleries pointing to the non-existent WME Warwickshire and WME Shropshire galleries - again these links had been sitting there for months doing nothing and I didn't think it gave visitors a good impression of my gallery management skills. I decided that something needed to be done, so I've taken the plunge with Warwickshire to see how things go.

What next?

What comes next is a big issue... WME Warwickshire may be off and running with 6 photos and 3 collections, but this constitutes the bare minimum in terms of content and whilst I'd rather use the photos on a proper gallery instead of keeping them in Warkstest indefinitely, this does leave me with a sizeable problem - how to keep the gallery regularly updated. I simply don't have the backup photos with which to provide a stream of updates, especially as Warkstest itself is now down to 6 photos, and its going to be an age before I get round to releasing any other Warwickshire stuff for testing (we're talking March 2006 photos when I'm currently still working on photos from March 2005). It looks like those 6 photos might be the only photos for quite a while yet!

And another dilemma - I had intended to launch the Warwickshire and Shropshire galleries at the same time. Unfortunately, as Saloptest only contains 8 photos, I didn't have enough photos to consider starting a WME Shropshire site - launching WME Warwickshire with only 12 photos in Warkstest was already pushing things to the limit! I've had to abandon plans to launch the Shropshire gallery, so I'm still stuck with a dormant Saloptest and a set of dead WME Shropshire links.

Despite all this, I am convinced that the launch of WME Warwickshire is a step in the right direction. I'm not sure how I'm going to keep the gallery ticking over, but it could be fun trying to sort it all out. In the meantime, the gallery will remain very much as the baby of the WME family, and it will be nice to have a newborn about the place again!