Carlisle DG

The first impression is not too promising; the first page, underneath CLICK HERE TO OPEN HOME PAGE says: " Website revision in progress July 2009, apologies for any gremlins" Which does not exactly inspire confidence. Once on the main site, however, things do improve. Visually it looks good; nice colour pictures of some churches, brief statement of the area covered and explanation of what the site contains for various different people; locals, ringers from outside the area and non-ringers.
The Officers page gives full contact details for all officers. The email address has been modified to avoid spam but an explanation is given.
Towers are listed alphabetically by branch but as there are only 2 branches with not many towers each, all are visible at once so it does not matter if you don't know which branch the tower you want is in. number of bells is not given on this page but a click on each tower takes you to the main tower entry which gives full details. Name, address, phone and email (modified if there is one) of tower contact. Excellent photo of the church, and as this is a tourist area there is lots of useful additional information -getting there, parking, eateries, toilets, external links. there is a slight difference between the branches-one has a link to the Dove map and the other to a slightly inferior map and the format for the tower pages is not as good on the Western Branch towers, but I assume this is being developed.
Details of the next Branch practices are listed, but some of the News is old, such as the Striking Competitions and Newsletters. the list of Surprise Practices is from 2009-10.
That's actually all there is. It's sufficient for finding out about practice nights,  tower contacts and events, but there are no optional extras such as rules (what is the peal fee or membership subscription, for instance) etc. I also kept getting Sorry, there has been a page error
and had to reload the home page., and the Carlisle Diocese links (eg http://www.carlislediocese.org.uk/churches/parishes/?parishid=3180) no longer seem to work, though this may be the fault of the Diocesan website. What there is here is good (apart from a few out of date events) and the additional tourist information is very useful, but it does need a little bit more information before it can be rated as a top class website. It is a small Guild however and deserves credit for doing what it does well and in a visually attractive way.