You might have noticed the site going through a few changes recently, a flurry of live blogging activity for the elections and a new Facebook fan page.

The reason is that we’re developing Blog Preston. It started out as a humble wordpress.com one-man-band operation back in January 2009 and since then has evolved into a community news and views site for Preston, Lancashire.

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I’ve been surprised by the level of people visiting the site, commenting on stories and just generally being so positive about it. I moved to Cardiff in January this year, but I’ve still kept my hand in with Blog Preston. The lovely Lisa McManus took over editing duties and has done a great job in keeping the site going, with some great contributions and also inspiring more people to lend their views to the site. Unfortunately, Lisa can’t continue with the editing duties (she will still be contributing articles though), so I thought I’d take the opportunity to take stock.

We want Blog Preston to be a hub of news, views and information and to do that we need more people onboard. Enter Andy Halls and Joseph Stashko. They had planned to start up MyPreston, but have agreed to come onboard with Blog Preston. Between them they will be taking over the editorship of Blog Preston and I’m looking forward to seeing what they can do.

As we saw with the election coverage (both general and national) these guys know what they are doing when it comes to new media reporting techniques, plus their passion for local news is obvious. I think Blog Preston is in safe hands with these two talented young journalists, and I hope that they can use this site as a launchpad for doing some really exciting things.

You’ll also see some changes to the site design itself as James Duffell gets to work on making some significant changes (you may have already seen the right-hand side of the website changing) and these will become apparent over the next few weeks and months.

So, what can you expect? We’ll be trying to cover a lot more of what’s happening in Preston, so if you’ve got events going on or things that you think are of interest please get in touch (contactus@blogpreston.co.uk). We also want to see more people contributing to Blog Preston as guest contributors, so if you’re passionate about a local issue or have something to say then also get in touch and we’ll get you onboard and writing.

I’m excited to see how the site develops over the next few months and I hope you’ll enjoy the journey.

Please let us know your thoughts below in the comments about Blog Preston’s development and if you’ve got any ideas for the site and what we should be covering, we’re all ears.