What we love about the new website
Real estate listings
We are thrilled to be introducing real estate listings to our new website! We love all things property, and we know so many of you do, too.
A HUGE thanks to our foundation real estate members Jordan’s Crossing, Drew Lindsay Sotheby’s International Realty, First National Real Estate Bowral & Belle Property Southern Highlands for showcasing their homes with us to share with you.
Soon, you’ll find listings in the Illawarra, Eurobodalla, Sapphire Coast and Queanbeyan, too.
Pop on over to take a look at the new property section of The Fold Southern Highlands and start bookmarking your faves.
Happy house-hunting!
It’s now a multi region website covering all of regional Oz!
The Fold Southern Highlands and The Fold Illawarra now sit within one site, alongside microsites for Eurobodalla, Sapphire Coast and Queanbeyan where we’ll deliver hyper-local stories, events, jobs and business listings for each region. In addition to that, we now showcase businesses and events for all of regional Australia – that’s huge!
Planning a week in Townsville? Check it out here. A weekend in Queanbeyan? Start planning. Looking for places to eat and things to do on your holiday to Ballarat? We got you!
There is SO much of regional Australia to explore, and we’re so excited to be able to share it with you.
An even bigger, broader business directory and events calendar
Did you know that we have wonderful team members dedicated to adding and maintaining the listings in our business directory, jobs board and events calendar in both the Highlands and the Illawarra? We do! Our Listing Managers are always busy adding and editing listings [which we are very grateful for!].
We’re excited to share that we’re now a member of the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse [ATDW] distribution network, publishing their feed of businesses and events as well [ATDW is Australia’s national platform which provides tourism operators throughout Australia a centralised tool for businesses to upload their details to improve their online visibility].
For us – it means our directory and events calendar will be even bigger with even more listings added every single day in the Southern Highlands and Illawarra [which’ll make our fab Listing Managers happy!], and will create an even better experience for you.
New features
You can now save events straight to your calendar from our event listings. Handy! Plus you can create an account so you can bookmark information you find and love to curate your very own personalised guide to the region.
These are just two of my fave features, with loads more cool things like that to come!
An app is coming
A new app is in the works! Watch this space…
Now, if you’re curious about why we’ve made this change, I’ll need to start at the beginning… You may want to pour a cuppa ☕️
A trip down memory lane
Flash back to when my family had just moved to the Highlands.
We were absolutely in love with it, but we didn’t know anyone, or where to go to make the most of it. We knew there was so much happening and so much to explore – we just didn’t know where, what and how to find it. And in a role marketing some local businesses at the time, I was struggling to find the perfect channel to reach the right audience…
So after many [many] late nights with my husband John and I tinkering away, building the website and bringing the idea to life, The Fold Southern Highlands was created as a go-to guide for our community and its businesses 💚
We published the first piece of content on The Fold Southern Highlands in November 2017.
One of The Fold Southern Highlands’ earlier Instagram posts. Wonderful local photographer @ashleymackevicius was so generous and shared a collection of his beautiful photography for us to use for our launch – we loved every single one of his photos so much and were so grateful to him for sharing them with us 🙏
The very first social post on The Fold Illawarra 💙 Launching in the Illawarra was such an exciting time! I was visiting the region every week form the Highlands at first which I absolutely loved doing – it was so much fun! And we grew the local team not long after launch.
The first year was amazing; the Highlands community embraced The Fold, and we knew we’d built something special. We loved giving locals instant access to all the people, places and businesses that make the region so wonderful, while helping those businesses share their stories.
When neighbours in the Illawarra started asking for the same, we launched The Fold Illawarra in January 2021. Lockdowns made for a bumpy start, but today our Illawarra community is absolutely thriving and continues to grow.
We quickly realised maintaining separate Highlands and Illawarra sites wasn’t sustainable, and we had also noticed that our audiences were overlapping as they searched the neighbouring region for inspiration [which was exciting to see happening!]. So the idea to build a multi-region website was seeded, and the idea and excitement just kept growing; there are so many more fabulous pockets of regional Australia where locals would benefit from the information that we share on The Fold – how can we take what we built and created in the Southern Highlands and Illawarra to other regional areas of Australia…?
We were incredibly fortunate to apply for, and be awarded a Meta Australian News Fund grant [where The Walkley Foundation and Meta partnered to support digital innovation in the media industry, supporting organisations like The Fold by investing in our innovative projects].
The grant was a huge factor in helping use move the idea of our multi-region website into a reality; fuelling the development of the new website and expansion into Geelong, Bendigo, Southern Tasmania, Port Macquarie, Wagga Wagga, Margaret River, Townsville, Toowoomba, Darwin and Ballarat, complete with ATDW-fed events and business listings [plus there’s loads of new articles and content landing in those regions soon!]. We’re so proud to have received the grant and incredibly grateful for such a generous and important contribution to our growth…
…and the great news kept coming. Last year, the NSW Government saw the positive impact The Fold can have on a region, and we were the recipients of NSW Regional Media Fund grants [which was a round of grants to help improve the long-term sustainability of regional NSW media]. Their grants helped us to build and launch The Fold Eurobodalla, The Fold Sapphire Coast & The Fold Queanbeyan.
With that incredible support, we built microsites for each of those regions as part of our new multi-region website, hired a local team on the ground in each region and created a suite of useful content to launch The Fold in these new regions. It’s been such a positive experience launching and importantly creating new jobs in those three wonderful regions, and incredibly fulfilling to see the impact we’ve made already. We’re already seeing such great reach, collaborating with the community, and working with local businesses who are embracing The Fold as a local marketing channel.
We were fortunate to partner with some excellent local experts which has made the whole experience such a fantastic one – My Venture Partners who conceptualised, designed and created our new multi-region website, and this powerful new website is hosted by local Southern Highlands hosting provider The Web Factory 👌
My role in the business has changed so much since those early days.
I miss writing articles, snapping photos of every coffee, meal, cocktail, street, tree [let’s face it – every moment!], chatting to local businesses and documenting my explorations, but as I focus on the new website and launching The Fold in our new regions, our wonderful Southern Highlands team [led by our lovely Editor Emma] and Illawarra team [with the fab Zoe leading the way] continue to do such a wonderful job sharing all the good news happening in their community. I couldn’t ask for a more dedicated team of locals who absolutely #LoveLivingLocal and love where they live.
And most important of all, they’ve been helping even more people, every single day, make the very most out of their beautiful region – which is what it’s always been about from the very beginning! Helping people find local businesses to support, places to explore, locals to admire and inspire, how to spend their Friday night, and where to go shopping on the weekend.
It’s a really great feeling to know we’re contributing in our own way, to helping the regions that we love so much, thrive.
Thank you for being part of The Fold community, it’s a wonderful place to be! We’re incredibly grateful for our audience and the support of the local businesses who work with us ♡
As always, we love to hear from you and welcome any feedback you have. Please email me at hello@thefoldmedia.com.au with any thoughts – I’d love to hear from you!