Three Full Years of Operation!

December 4^th, 2002 marks three years of operation for our family web site. It was conceived and set up as a communication tool, to assist in the organisation of the reunion in August, 2000. It was successful in this role. Now it continues as a repository of family information that many appear to find interesting, and even enjoy.

Scott obtained the domain name reunion.dhs.org about two years ahead of time, thinking it may be useful. Little did he know!. Thanks to his foresight and his technical expertise we have had a quality, easily accessible web site available 24x7 AT NO COST! (Web hosting, particularly with your own domain name often costs a a lot of money.) In the past few months the site was moved painlessly to a computer in my home, and the domain name transferred, again thanks to Scott for handling it.

According to our access logs, we have been visited from locations all over the globe. We have had visits from all over the U.S.A., from Japan, China, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, and France to name just a few countries. Our visit counter on the home page has recorded in excess of 6400 hits. Not bad for a small family site! (That's a drop of nearly 50% from the first year, but to be expected as there is less new information being added since the 2000 Reunion is well behind us. I expect it will pick up as the 2003 Reunion comes closer.) We are linked to by at least 5 sites that I am aware of, listed by Yahoo.com, and checked out daily by "GoogleBot", the software "robot" that Google.com use to locate web pages for their web search service.

I have had contact with many distant relatives I would otherwise likely never have come to know, and have even met some of them. I look forward to being in contact with many more as they happen upon our Web Site.

The web site has been an interesting project, and as the freedom is here to do as we see fit, it has been much more rewarding than the corporate site I also author. Here, I set the standards, lay out the design, have the final say on colours, backgrounds and all the other details. (Not so at work.) It is fun. I have learned a great deal. I expect I shall learn a great deal more.

Thank you for visiting, for without visitors, a web site is like the guy who winks at a pretty girl in the dark; going through the motions, but so what? To those who have supplied content; many, many thanks. The web site and the family are much richer for your efforts.

On this, the third anniversary of our web site, why not sign the guest book and let us know what you think of our little effort. Tell us what you would like to see appear. If you have additional information to add to what we have, we would be pleased to add it to the site, too.