Womens Thoughts

My name is Christine Fyffe ( that`s me on the right) and my friend and business partner Anne Richards came up with the idea to have  a website for women to pop on to for a few minutes.  ‘A Coffee Break Surf’ we call it, in search of useful or useless information or to chat to like minded women.

This is our story:-

My Blog called Social Networking starts the tale

Months and years pass quickly when you get older and women these days are more conscious of what is happening in their life, particularly when you get to our age of 40 something.
Major life changes occur normally with the children leaving home to start on their own.

It was because of that reason that I began thinking about this idea.

It was the end of  June 2007 when the rains started! I was feeling melancholy knowing that the second of my children would be leaving for university. 
I decided to look on the internet to see if there were any other 40 something women out there who were feeling the same and wanted to share their thoughts.  I am not a big computer person and had heard about these new social sites being the entire craze, so I thought I will look for something suitable for me.

On the search engine I typed in the words ‘bored housewife’ I was bored and fed up.
Wow! did I get a surprise on what appeared on the screen.

Okay change the wording a bit – new at this, so let’s try ‘girls chat’ I never realised how many naughty sites were out there.  I’m just not looking for that.

Keep going… ‘Ladies club’, ‘friends talk’. Everything I typed in the search box came up with either geriatric organisations or the majority of sexual connotations known to man.
Do I type in ‘Frustrated’ because that is how I am beginning to feel… don’t be stupid – guess what comes up… 

I am ready to scream ‘Is there no one out there who just wants to talk about how to put a zing into your apple pies?  Or my kids are moving on – don’t feel on your own?’ 

My daughter did try to help by introducing me to these new social sites – Face book, Bebo etc, but in truth, I was nervous as they look so complicated.

I don’t want to chat to 20 year olds or see them posing in photos that suggest all sorts of implications.  I have surpassed that now.
 
Nor, am I really interested in being chatted up by some smooth young stud, who thinks being friends with an older woman is like being with ‘Mrs Robinson’. 

I just wanted to be able to click on a site that was easy to use, pretty to look at and made you feel welcome and relaxed like being in a friend’s home even though you are sitting at your own computer, in the knowledge that you were sharing ideas and thoughts having a giggle and generally making you feel better with people like me, in their 40’s and upwards…

There are lots of women out there whose lives are changing and I’m sure are feeling the same and don’t know who to look for on the internet. 

So why not build one myself I thought, a network site for women in their 40’s. (30’s, 50’s girls just join!)  

But I needed help – call in the cavalry!

We were on a girly day out to RHS show at Tatton Park, sipping Pimms outside in the sunshine (thankfully the rain held off that day!) when I broached the subject to Anne, who herself was at that time in life when her children were fleeing the nest, if not already flown and she was beginning to feel a little lost.

Amazingly, Anne was all for the idea and in the September we joined a web design course at Cheshire College to help us understand what we were going to get involved in. Six months down the road we came out with City & Guilds awards and our web site built and up and running by March 2008.

Women's Thoughts was launched.

Little did we realise that this was only the start.

We found it nervous to post any articles on our site, even more so to chat to women about the site, thinking that it wasn't good enough. It is so easy to lose your confidence after years of being a stay at home mum; you feel that no one will be interested.

The information on the site grew, our ideas changed and we kept adding and altering accordingly.

This last 18 months has been a massive learning curve for us, but we have enjoyed every minute, even the downs as well as the ups.

We have so much to do and there are never enough hours in the day - but we will continue...

We hope you enjoy popping in to see us !

If you have a story to tell, we would love to hear from you - Contact Us

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