About LayStar

The Magazine

LayStar is an independent and free online magazine, reaching out to a diverse readership and promoting both new and experienced writers. LayStar is location-based, meaning that articles can also be location-based. For example, a topic may be of importance to a single village or town. Articles may also be of a county or national interest. Submissions could be anything from village news, interesting factual debates to fictional short stories.

LayStar encourages visitors to tell us about their favourite locations. Unlike many location-based web sites, we have not put every UK village, town and city into our database. Instead, we rely on our visitors to add and write about their favourite locations.

Anyone can contribute to LayStar. We offer a service that many writer's web sites do not: a real audience. On a writer's web site, writers' submissions are geared to appease other writers that mark and comment them. With LayStar, writers get their work into the public domain and can choose whether their work should receive ratings. We believe this is a more rewarding opportunity and gives writers the chance to test their subject matter and writing styles. It is a particularly useful resource for training journalists and budding writers wanting to break into the market.

LayStar Events is a free service for anyone wanting to promote something locally. It could be an event or a notice and is an ideal online community notice board for event hosts to direct their clients.

The LayStar Directory is for attractions and services. There is a free service where anyone can submit basic details about a service or attraction. There is also a subscription service to enhance and promote businesses and alike.

LayStar Property is an advertising service that exploits both the web and computer technology to enable private sellers and independent agents to market property. We pride ourselves on our development of a low-maintenance system that reduces the overall cost of providing such a service. We also think we provide a property advertising service that is better than most magazines and is a strong rival for dedicated property marketing sites.

LayStar has the same ingredients as many good magazines - something to whet the appetite for many people from all walks of life. Though still in our infancy, we have a long way to go. We have some great people contributing to the site to help us get there.

Humble Beginnings

LayStar started life in 2005 as a one-man project to aid the learning and understanding of web scripting languages and similar technologies. As more and more concepts were learnt, the more ideas started flowing into the LayStar project and the more useful LayStar became. We decided to keep the site going and, since that decision, we and our contributors have put a great deal of effort into providing rich and varied content.