Unearth, Explore, Enlighten
For the past few months we’ve been transforming the look of Beyond the Point, getting through many hours of coding and transferring articles – and many cups of tea! This has been the biggest change since we founded BTP 5 years ago – which has seen the decaying past brought into the 21st century. To celebrate our fifth birthday we’ve launched our fresh look which includes a new website, logo and slogan.
Our new look puts hundreds of historic locations right at the heart of our website, on our interactive map, and allows you to easily search your local area and see what’s around. We’ve also added many more historic places, expanding out further to London, Colchester and beyond. Our alternative search method allows you to search more specifically, by selecting a specific type, status or location.
We found that what our site really needed was a way for people to easily see all the reams content we have at once. Basing the old site on a blog template, people might often have neglected our place listing tab for only the few recent places featured on our homepage. Now you can see them all at once on our map, or by searching, with picture previews. Our map is generally a bit brighter, showing all the greenery of the British countryside, although due to a last minute teething problem, it’s currently looking a little bland – although not for long! Our most recent news articles are below the map on the homepage too.
We’ve also introduced an exciting little tool that allows you to see a location then and now. Our Time Tool allows you to see how a place, item or landscape has changed over time – which is done by taking a modern photo in the exact same place as an older one. To use our Time Tool, simply drag the arrows left and right. And if you’ve viewing one of our many galleries, simply hover over a photo and click on the yellow expand button to view it larger and use the arrow keys to navigate through the selection.
Discover Historic Sites
Aside from the rather grand interactive map and search on our homepage, we have a page which allows you to look at all the places we cover sorting them by not just location as before, but past use, current status, and historic era. For instance if you only prefer ancient history, you can see all our content in one place. You can start looking through the glorious catalogue of places here. And don’t forget to rate the locations and leave your thoughts at the bottom of the page.
Documentaries
All of our documentaries on Beyond the Point TV are much easier to watch as well. We’ve integrated these into our website, so whenever we add one on YouTube, they will automatically appear in our Documentaries section. You can watch our latest video or browse through our archive to see previous ones.
Guides
Coming soon to the website will be an exciting new section that we’ll be launching. ‘Adventuring Outdoors‘, will replace the previous ‘Surviving the British Countryside Series’ which left a lot to be desired. Here we will add a range of guides, tips and tricks covering everything from what to wear when you are out and exploring, what camera is the best to buy, through to the flora and fauna you might encounter when wandering the secluded spots of your locality.
General History
We’ve added a whole new page for this as we felt we wanted to be able to write about historic topics that fascinated us, yet didn’t fit into local history. After all it was history in general – present through the likes of the Horrible Histories book series, that helped history first catch our attention many years ago. This section will try and focus on quirky topics rather than your bog-standard textbook rundowns, looking into everything from what dragons really meant in the Middle Ages, through to Roman cooking, and pirate radio!
So head back over to our homepage and get exploring our site! Our brand new homepage video will also show you what it is that the BTP boys actually do.
Whilst most of the historic locations have been transferred over to our new website, we plan to have the remaining outstanding ones on this new one in the very near future. This is an ongoing process and we have worked hard to move well over 100 onto the site in the space of two months!
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