Norwich Portal aims to the be premier internet resource for local people and anyone else who wants to find anything on the web to do with Norwich (Norfolk, UK). The local news headlines are provided by www.edp24.co.uk, eveningnews24.co.uk, BBC News, BBC Sport, and The Pink 'Un. The travel news is provided by the BBC. News from the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital is also included.

It is our intention to do everything we can to ensure Norwich Portal remains free to use, free to submit your site to and free of advertising.

We are always looking to find ways to improve our search engine, so please contact us to let us know how we can improve our web site, directory and search engine.

Please read our privacy policy if you are interested on what information we collect about our visitors.

Who Founded Norwich Portal?

Norwich Portal was built and is run by Matthew Bohan in his spare time. Matthew currently works as a senior systems developer working for a blue chip company in Norwich. For more information please see Matthew's personal web site.

Norwich Portal started life as Norwich Search, which was just a directory and search engine. However with the addition of Travel News, News and Weather information the site was renamed Norwich Portal.

Technology

For those of you that are technically inclined, Norwich Portal was built using PHP and MySQL, running on a Fedora Core Linux server. Some components (including web thumbnail functionality) were built using Visual Basic.NET 2005.

Our Web Crawler (spider or robot)

For information regarding the Norwich Portal automated web crawler please click here.

How do I suggest a site for inclusion in the Norwich Portal directory?

To suggest a web site for inclusion in our directory please follow this link.

Norwich Portal News

20/02/2007 : Accepted web site submissions will now appear as a news item complete with web thumbnail image. It will mean front page exposure for your web site. The best part of all this is that its completely free to submit your site. Submit your own website now!

We have also added a Calendar Index Page to allow easier searching for headlines / sites added for a particular day.

24/01/2007 : Made a tweak to the search algorithm to improve the quality of results returned.

19/01/2007 : Added 25 more Norwich related sites to the directory.

12/01/2007 : Added even more sites to our directory.

07/01/2007 : Updated the main search algorithm to improve the quality of search results, especially for multi worded search terms. Have also added another large batch of sites to the directory.

30/12/2006 : Added a news feed from The Pink 'Un.

29/12/2006 : Addition of a privacy policy and added more information to the about page.

28/12/2006 : News from the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust will now appear in the news headlines.

27/12/2006 : Added 'Submit URL' links to search results / category pages. Added another batch of new web sites as well as the Your MP's page.

06/07/2006 : Added ability to view cached version of web sites in the directory as well as searches. Viewing cached pages when surfing will automatically highlight your search terms.

04/07/2006 : Search results will now display a thumbnail of any matching web sites in addition to the textual links. info@norwichportal.co.uk

03/07/2006 : We are pleased to announce that as today we have switched over to our own in house web site thumbnail system. Previously we used thumbshots.org which was fine, but it would only work for sites which were listed in the Open Directory Project. Our new process means that all of the web sites listed in our directory will show up as a thumbnail. At the same time we have completed our trawl through all of the sites and have deleted any dead links. If you have have any questions on this please let us know by emailing us at info@norwichportal.co.uk

23/04/2006 : The search functionality has been enhanced, the search page will now suggest alternative words to search for based on your search term, if the number of results found is under 10.

22/04/2006 : We are in the process of manually checking/updating the listings of all sites in the directory, so the number of dead links on the directory pages should reduce over the next week or so.

21/04/2006 : The search function will search the current news as well as the directory.

To submit your site for free to the directory, please e-mail submit@norwichportal.co.uk.