Blog of the week: Eye on Manchester

This week’s pick of the posts is an old favourite which has had a new lease of life.
Under various guises, Eye on Manchester has been the online home for the dedicated photojournalism of Aidan O’Rourke since 1997 and in fact was a vibrant part of our www.manchesteronline.co.uk website for many years.
But in December, Aidan took the plunge and launched out with a re-vamped version of his site – no small feat for an enterprise of such a vast size.
He said: “After months of preparation, I made the long-awaited new design live but within a few hours of making it live, on the basis of monitoring, I decided to start making changes.
“Over the coming weeks, months and probably years, the site will evolve incrementally with small changes taking place here and there. I have learned that when you have a large website, it is often not a good idea to make a set of major changes all at the same time because if something has a negative effect, it’s difficult to find out what it is. A website is a kind of web application and should be developed in a similar way.”
It’s hard to explain just how much material there is within this blog but well worth exploring. Aidan says he is the “eye” that’s referred to in the title “literally the ‘eye’ or photographer who is ‘keeping an eye’ on the city and documenting its changing face.”
Are there any buildings which haven’t been documented by his eager lens? Seems unlikely but the recording of the city’s evolution doesn’t stop there with pictures of events, video interviews, information on local history and forums for community discussions.
Aidan says he now gets 200,000 page views every month – log onto www.eyeonmanchester.com to see why.
We are always hunting around for blogs or websites to feature here, and in Saturday’s M.E.N on the e-view page so, if you’ve got one to nominate, submit a link below or contact us. The only criteria is that they have some connection with Manchester.