Caithness Community Web Site - Northern Highlands - Scotland

Caithness Community Web Site covering the furtherst north mainland county in the Highlands of Scotland still booming. The site now has over 20,000 pages and over 14,000 photographs. Many changes have taken place. The site now employs two people and is still growing. The main web site is still not for profit but it has helped to create a business - Scorrie Internet Services. The web sites get over 3000 visitors a day over 4.5 million hits a month reading over 400,000 pages a month and its still rising. Income is being derived from advertising, building other web sites and other sources of revenue are still opening up in areas like tourism. Caithness.org won the Yell.com award (www.yell.com/awards)in October 2001 for Best Community Site in the UK and was selected as best site in the UK. Bill Fernie who set up the site was selected as Citizen of the Year 2001 by Wick Rotary Club. Caithness.org is now one of the biggest community web sites in Scotland and the UK. The Business Pages are amongst the most comprehensive of any county in Scotland and still free to businesses. Ffax number to email service for all local businesses who have a fax. Caithness.org still offers free pages to every voluntary group in the county and is beginning to make a profit. Caithness.org has launch its own Search Engine. Other developments are still underway - keep going with your own project it can be done. The mix of social, voluntary, local and tourist type pages copmbined with message boards ands chat rooms has been very successful. Caithness.org has monitors for these services round the globe to ensure that the servces are not abused. The site is updated several times a day mainly seven days a week and from three separate locations. We now have three web sites. Major innovations have been the opening up of our own newsfeeder system that we are trialling and beginning to send out to other people free of charge. We give away free small java scripts on our www.maxxblade.co.uk web site to aid our profile in the techy world. The range of local information and services on the web site is increasing but we are aided by the fact that many local people now send us in information for inclusion on the site. We have added fun things like our local Caithness dialectiser. the message boards have had a major upgrade this weekend and now have new services. The boards have had many thousands of postings and have people on the boards browsing nearly all day. Work will begin shortly on a new business web site to take in the counjty next door to us Sutherland. www.caithness.org www.caithness-business.co.uk www.scorrie.co.uk Tel 01955 604648 Bill Fernie 6 January 2003