www.sneem.com - Etienne Muller

Hello all of you folks out there. With sneem.com now running uninterrupted since 20th Oct. 1998: that makes eight years. It currently stands at around 260 pages and contains about 550 photographs.

First some quick statistics. More interesting than you may at first think.

Actual hits on the website (used by some website managers to impress) are in the millions.

Total pages viewed in 2005 = 228,000

Total pages viewed in 2006 until mid August = 220,000

individual visitors in 2005 = 61,481

Individual visitors in 2006 until mid August = 48,912

Currently we are averaging about 200 visits per day. Up tenfold on year one.

Many of these visitors drop in for a couple of pages and drop right out again. Around 15% of these visits are by web-crawlers indexing the site for various search engines. Some are robots trying to harvest e-mail addresses. It is still an impressive number.

The most visited pages for August 2006 were:

/ - (the home page)

/main - (the main directory)

/accommodation.html - (the accommodation directory)

/bedandbreakfast.html - (the b&b directory)

/skelligs/skelligsmain.html - (the Skelligs directory)

/hotels.html

/selfcatering.html - (the Self-catering directory)

/townpics/townthumbs.html - (views of the town)

/housesforsale.html

/sports.html - (for some reason the sports directory)

The picture on the mail page has become quite popular too. Thank goodness I am not getting mail from everyone who looks at it.

A surprising number of visitors are logging directly onto the Sneem home page by either typing in www.sneem.com in the address bar of their browsers or by just typing in sneem. This Illustrates the enormous value of the dot com suffix; particularly for places. Google is by far the biggest referrer to the site though, leaving all other search-engines in the dust. A lot of the access points of these searches are web pages within sneem.com which have been searched.

Other referrers which are sending a lot of traffic to sneem.com are:

http://brushwoodstudios.com

http://southkerryadvertiser.com

http://heavenlyireland.com

http://ierland-vissen.nl

These domains are good friends to sneem.com, though they may be unaware of it. This shows the importance of linking from other domains. If you have a website to which sneem.com is relevant you can help by putting in a link.

I first decided to set up www.sneem.com back in 2008 after being charged sixty pounds plus vat for a one-line link to my Brushwood Studios Gallery site. I felt that if I didn't get going on the Sneem project, someone else would, and I would end up paying an arm and a leg to be linked up to my own village's website. With this in my mind I kept my charges to the very minimum required to run a professional site. I wanted even kids to be able to afford to post a directory if they wanted to. Prices have not increased since the start in 1998.

This policy could only have worked if I had sufficient paying subscribers and I would like to thank all of you who have made this possible.

The Sneem website operates on the following premise. Firstly: if people find the site through searches for activities and areas of local interest, and they like what we have to offer, they will want to come and stay here. Secondly: the website should be a connection for absent Sneemites who would like to stay in touch with home base.

A few new areas of the site that many of you may not have visited are:

The poetry submission section (arts directory)

The garden of the senses

The beer tasting festival

The Sneem family festival link

With valiant and necessary efforts being made on various fronts to put our village more firmly on the map than it already is; I sometimes feel that sneem.com, working quietly (and unbelievably reasonably) in the background, goes unnoticed behind the hectic agendas of other projects.

As an instant window to the world the website is actually of incalculable value to the town and will become more so as the years go by. I would like to put a lot more time into the site than I do, unfortunately the modern world seems to have turned time into a rare resource.

There are areas of the site that need expanding, and areas of interest that I am not clued into enough to do any justice. Anyone interested in contributing on - sports - history - fishing - the school - drama - music - absent friends - who's doing what now - genealogy - or any other subject relevant to Sneem - I would be very interested in hearing from you....

e-mail - Please put "Sneem website" in the subject line as I get lots of spam and would hate to delete your letter by accident.

Etienne Muller - Brushwood Studios - Sneem - Co. Kerry - 064 45108

My thanks to all of you out there who sent e-mail and encouragement. Keep checking back.

Etienne