Our story
Green Durham began as a project, ran by Transition Durham, aiming to merge their website with the sites of Durham Local Food and The North East Permaculture Network.
The aim was to provide a single site to help people find sustainable businesses, local food providers and community groups from around County Durham and the wider northeast.
The website currently lists around 300 groups and organisations covering over 70 categories. The focus is on organisations serving people living around County Durham. Exceptions are made for the interesting and unique which results in some places from Yorkshire, Cumbria and the Scottish borders, also being included.
Categories include a wide variety of local food producers and retailers; Community Gardens, Woodland and Orchards; Campaign groups and initiatives helping with everything from reducing food waste to fixing your bike.
Our advice
We wanted to minimise our impact in our choice of website host. So the selection of the hosting company included factors such as ethical policy, renewable energy and a commitment to running efficient data centres.
We also wanted a UK-based host, partly to simplify regulation and support but also to minimise the effective distance (hops) over the internet to most of our users.
Our Changeprint
Our Changeprint can be measured by the increased support for all the sustainable businesses and food providers around County Durham on our website. But, as the Billy Bragg lyric goes, "Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted", and the wide range of end benefits (from reducing food waste to saving stuff from landfill) is not counted by the stats on visitors to our website.
