Gornal News & Goings On

NEWS

A Thousand Thanks! Yampy Visitor Numbers Soar Click To Enlarge On Tuesday 21st January 2003 our webstats showed that the www.yampy.co.uk visitor count has reached an amazing 150 per day - more than a thousand per week!. When the site was launched at the end of July 2002 our aim was to achieve 100 per day. This was easily attained by November, but December's figure slipped back to 98, leading us to think that our initial target was about right. However, December's result has turned out to be a Christmas blip caused by too much turkey and not enough surfing, because our traffic has grown by 50% in the first three weeks of January. Our visitors appear to come from three main sources. Gornal people, of course, make up the bulk of our traffic. Then there is an important 'ex-pat' contingent anxious to keep in touch. Although a large proportion of these seem to be living in the USA or Australia, an incredible thirty eight countries have surfed in to date, from Austria to Venezuala via Cyprus, Moldova and Singapore (click here to see the list of countries so far this month). Our most recent addition has been Peru - a chap emailed us in Spanish to say that his grandad always told him that his middle name came from a place 'de Europa'. His name? Miguel Angel Ruiton Escarate! The third source of our traffic is that the excellent search rankings that we are achieving - both for ourselves and our customers - mean that we are attracting an increasing number of casual surfers. Our web stats record the search strings used to find us, and they make interesting reading! We appear to have satisfied surfers' most basic needs with 'gold gornal' and 'sex gornal', handled very specialised requests like 'antediluvian history' and 'scooby translator', plus extremely general ones like 'medical encyclopaedia', 'black country humour', and 'RAC travel directions'. We are grateful to all of our readers for your support so far, particularly as the site itself isn't technically very good yet. If you would like to help us further, just spread the word as much as possible, especially in Gornal village where a worrying number of businesses are not prepared to support us commercially - but are happy to accept the free publicity for them that we demonstrably generate. One MD told us that he spends £35,000 on advertising each year, but couldn't pay £6 per month to us because 'you have to stop somewhere'. So if you hear about a service via Yampy, please let the shop or trade know about it. Many thanks again for going so completely Yampy!

Next: Mike's yampy Yank site..