In short, the Fabulous North is a huge directory of places to visit in the north of the UK. It's actually a personal project, but over four years of regular development has probably become one of the largest platforms I have built. Developed in c# MVC 7 and then upgraded to 9, the platform is feature rich and I still continue to make regular development updates.

Let me give you a quick tour of the Content Management System which is fully bespoke for this project. The platform allows places to be added with categories, tags, locations, What3Words (which looked up the longitude and latitude before W3W put the API behind a firewall), maps, directions and publishing schedules.

A headless page builder was then created and integrated allowing the content and images to be easily added with all images being stored and delivered from an external CDN.

The platform was then upgraded to allow walks to be added cross referencing places visited on the walk. GPX files can also be imported and then routes created with leaflets automatically output.

Further updates included FAQs, challenges, statistics and AI Meta suggestions. The platform is now used by seven contributors, adding new posts daily and is incredibly easy to use.

The front end website is also feature rich. Not only does it showcase 1,300+ places and walks, it also has a VIP login area allowing visitors to register, save places they have visited, add places to their bucket list and manage their challenges.

Places can be easily found by an advanced search facility filtering by region, categories, keywords and even showing places they haven't visited yet.

One of the best features on the platform is plotting all the places on a map, colour coded by visited, bucket list and to do, allowing visitors to plan a road trip.

But the feature we get most positive feedback on is the league table. As visitors can tick off places they have visited, we added weighted scores to the places and created a league table based of this.

It can get so competitive that people spend 3 hours in a car and then walk 10km just so they can tick off a lime kiln in the middle of nowhere to get 3 points for the league table!

The CMS has also been upgraded to be multi-platform allowing it to manage additional websites such as Northumberland Trigs, Durham Trigs and Cheviot 99.

I think I have probably spent 500 development hours on the Fabulous North platform and we are just about to hit 2 million page views a year! It's a superb project and am constantly looking for new ways to improve it. With it being a personal project I can really push the tech without the shackles of a client project and a lot of the development I have done on it has been rolled out to my commercial projects too.

Website - fabulousnorth.com