IpswichGigs.co.uk 2003 – 2010

This article is outdated, please visit www.ipswichgigs.co.uk for the latest news

IpswichGigs.co.uk was started by me (Andrew Culture) and Henry Sutcliffe in January 2003, and switched off on July 1st 2010. Our original mission was promote (what was at the time) a woefully underrepresented alternative music scene here in Ipswich.

In January 2010 we thought long and hard about how the advent of social networking was affecting IpswichGigs.co.uk and decided that we were faced with making a tough choice about whether to carry on or not. We could celebrate the fact that the alternative music scene in Ipswich is now mainstream (and is brilliantly represented by many websites and publications) and decide we had reached our original goals, or we could build a new website to try and revitalise our users.

We decided to build a fantastic new IpswichGigs.co.uk website based on the Drupal CMS system. Despite the incredible amount of time we put into this third version of the website visitors numbers continued to dwindle and it became more of an effort to encourage people to use the site. IpswichGigs.co.uk is owned by my company Web Care Takers (well my trading name to be precise) and I invested considerable amounts of money in developing the website and promoting it both online and offline. The decision to close the site wasn’t based on money, but the money spent on hosting and developer fees has to be taken into consideration.

In March 2010 I decided to give IpswichGigs.co.uk one last hard push to see if we could revive the vibrant community website that it used to be. Three months later I started to accept the fact that FaceBook is now taking over independent small community based sites. It’s now almost impossible to attract people to a website that exists outside of the ‘closed garden’ that Facebook is.

But we’re not bitter – we have reached every one of the objectives that we set ourselves seven years ago when we launched IpswichGigs.co.uk, and we celebrate the fact that social networking has democratised the promotion of live music. We believe that the IpswichGigs.co.uk page on Facebook will be a useful resource for music lovers in this town.

I have had a great deal of help and support over the years and without a whole host of people IpswichGigs.co.uk wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has. You guys (and girls) know who you are and you know how much I appreciate you.

It’s been a fun seven years, but now it’s over.

P.S We did relaunch the site in January 2012, but we really shouldn’t have bothered.