We have growing contact with people from outside the county - for example over half is from out of Caithness and a growing amount from overseas. Visitors from over 63 countries in January. January was 41% up on December ands already in February we have passed the January totals. Somewhere in the last few months we stepped over some invisible threshold i think and we have been trying to confirm for ourselves what it was. There are several and one you have referred to is a constantly updating front page.
We have gone overboard with it in the last few months as i have devoted a lot of time to constantly adding new material and we add about 100 pages a week now at least some times more.
Photographs are an absolute winner. We are getting endless praise for them and really they are not so special - i take them and process them but they are succeeding in achieving my aim of bringing people back to the web site, making people see the real Caithness ordinary streets as well as pretty views. i am mixing social, voluntary commentary along with tourist information.
One example was the Citizens Advice report in to debt and unemployment in Caithness. What normal tourist site runs these things together and yet we get no adverse comments from the readers. I do not know how many people thinking about coming here read the report but even if they do I think from the comments i am getting that they fully understand what a community web site is about. In fact they trust what we say far more than the Tourist Board. We are also delivering more basic information as well as the places to stay and transport info. We are showing them all the things that local people do and giving them a better idea of what is going on - not just entertainment but serious issues - everyone going on holiday does not lie on the beach.
Examples i have plenty and i think we are stimulating trade here because of it. Two sisters in California are coming to Caithness because they saw notices for Country Dancing in a local Village Hall - they emailed us for more details. they do this at home but wanted to do it in Scotland. We contacted a village hall to discover there is lots of country dancing all over halls in Caithness. they just never thought to advertise it. They welcome visitors and usually get them from friends visiting but would be happy to get others . We are now to add more country dancing too our listings now we are aware of it.
We have others who are coming because they want to join in with the local Field Club historical walks. why has no one thought tourists might like to do this before. I could go on - there are a growing list of examples of this but you get the idea. I am discovering things all the time.
Anyway the point is your web site has to have changing front page content at least once a week - and could you make the text a bit bigger as although you can adjust the screen many older people are not sure how to do it. I know because i have told so many people with poor eyesight that they can do it. After that the amount that can go on is endless. Certainly variety of content gets us audience. If you are to have a limited subject matter then that is fine as long as you realise you will get only people interested in that topic and others will probably not come back.
Main question is: what is your web site for and who is it aimed at. If it can have definite focus you will get it done. Our web site is not a good one to copy in that respect because it has been a vehicle for my many and varied ideas and experiments. I also realise how difficult it is to replicate. I have been asked many times by other areas how they can do what we do. The combination of skills is not so unique but the drive and time available is quite daunting for many people. I put in about 40 - 50 hours a week on the web site now and others contribute items to me to feed in. also i have free technical support from my whizz kid so. So although we argue - er debate a lot on what goes in and other matters - my time and knowledge of various things in the county mean we make an almost unstoppable force in web site terms.
We have also spent 18 months getting ourselves positioned on search engines, link swaps and so on. If you want to test this go to www.google.com and search for caithness - you will be amazed at how many hits take you to caithness.org this did not happen by chance it took a lot of effort and a long time as we ploughed on relentlessly building and swapping links entering ourselves on search engines and then we got someone else to do it using specialised software for free.
I am now building an e-commerce shop to be called "E Caithness Shop" this is a play on words which is difficult to get over unless you live here. E in Caithness is the local word for The Locals in Caithness have always and still do use it instead of the definite article so everything starts in conversations with E manny - the Man E Lassigie - the girl and so on.
Locals will understand immediately the connection - in fact it has been a Caithness joke ever since E-commerce was ever heard of e-commerce is what people in the north understood has been going on for hundreds of years. So you get the idea. It works both locally and out on the Net and it’s simple.
Following along we are already working on a fourth web site to be called Scorrie.com Again it is local dialect Scorrie is the Caithness word for seagull. Many businesses are called Seagull all over the place but none naturally are called Scorrie. It is instantly memorable in many Scottish towns and especially here and for other parts Scorrie is relatively easy to remember. This web site will offer various web services - from web site construction to data bases and computer work generally. not from or by me but building an agency of people who have these skills. We also intend it to become a vehicle for training services in Internet and related work. How long have you got - - I think that will do you for now.
Keep going ... You have done what i keep telling others to do get the first pages up - you can go from there - all the talk and training will not get you started. Get in front of the PC with the manual and someone who has already done it to show you a few things and learn as you go. We treated it and still do as fun and learning at the some time. We have never had any dry runs or practice. Our practice is what you see . We have put it on as we learned how to do it. It has encouraged people no end to see their first pages go on the web. And encourages them to tweak them and learn as they go. Will have a look again in a few weeks to see how you are getting on.
Bill Fernie (23 Feb 2001)
http://www.caithness.org
27 Feb 2001