THE mayor of Wellington, Cllr Janet Lloyd, has once again questioned why £7,500 has been spent on promoting the town on a website operated by the Visit Somerset organisation.

Wellington Town Council commissioned Visit Somerset last June to develop and update information about the town on the Visit Somerset website – promoting local businesses, facilities and events.

But so far it has failed to impress the mayor, Cllr Lloyd, who believes the money could have been spent elsewhere.

Cllr Lloyd, speaking at the town council’s economic development committee on April 15, said that £7,500 represented the precept money the council received from 38 per cent of Band D Council Taxpayers in Wellington.

“If you asked those people what we were spending their money on they might come up with hanging baskets for the town, clean streets or the Christmas Lights,” she said. “I doubt very much they would say Visit Somerset as the first option.

“We are scrabbling around for money to support other projects we want to do and here we are spending £7,500 on Visit Somerset and we are having to do a lot of the work!”

Cllr Lloyd added: “Why we are spending £7,500 on this I just do not know. I took a look at the website last week and there were a lot of things about Wellington not on there.

“We could do all this in-house. I don’t think the Visit Somerset website is showing Wellington in a good light.”

Cllr John Thorne was concerned that there seemed to be confusion over who should be doing what with the Wellington coverage on the website.

Cllr Keith Wheatley, who has been a supporter of the Visit Somerset initiative, said: “If you think back to the early days of online promotion of businesses and organisations and we tended to think that creating a website was all you had to do for promotion and people would find it.

“But things have changed over the past ten or 15 years and websites are not the promotional aid they once were, but just a place where all the information is stored. You now need the likes of Instagram and print promotions to point people in the direction of the website.”

Cllr Wheatley said there were no proposals at the present time to spend another £7,500 on Visit Somerset.

The council’s chief executive, Dave Farrow, said: “We will do a more detailed report about this and see how we move forward.

“There is still plenty to do, but the work that has been done is showing the potential for what it could do.

“We need to tie-in more cleverly with the Visit Somerset organisation and create more content for the website.”

A report said that the information about Wellington on the Visit Somerset website included 28 future events, 20 accommodation providers, 17 food and drink outlets and 22 retail outlets with Cllr Wheatley having used his “local knowledge and contacts to gather content and oversee editorial/layout sections.”