A brand new search engine has been unveiled by the Woodland Trust allowing anyone to search for UK woods based on location, facilities and natural features. The £1.2m search engine, funded as part of the by Natural England through the ‘Access to Nature’ programme.
Indexing over 1,000 different UK woods, the site offers 3 different searching methods. The principal search facility offers choices of location, wood name and facilities such as parking. An A-Z list will help you find a list of woods in your region with the map function offering a geographical perspective on wood location and choice. The current site is just part of a 5 year programme that will see a brand new search engine in Autumn 2010 to include far more information about how to use the woods.
“As part of a five-year programme, a dedicated VisitWoods project team will launch the new website in autumn 2010. It will be a gateway to site-based information, searchable maps, inspiring ideas, free downloadable resources, comments and pictures provided by wood visitors plus direct links to thousands of woodland websites.”
UGC will also be a key part of the new site, with the Woodland Trust recruiting volunteers to help write inspiring local content for the site and offer support to other users looking to gain information and inspiration.
www.visitwoods.co.uk currently redirects to the main Woodland Trust site with some search functions mentioned as well as a number of downloads and fact sheets. This current information has cleverly been harnessed from existing Woodland Trust content sites. The potential for the full search engine to harness the wider social, complementing existing Trust content makes this a hot ticket for 2010.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.