The site has been a hobby thing so far, run on a voluntary basis. This is likely to change in the near future. To maintain it's long term viability it is necessary to have more local people working seriously on the content. We intend to start an active programme in this area shortly also using some of the Telecom Eireann Information Age £1M prize fund. A proposal was submitted to Telecom in October 1997 detailing plans for this aspect. The details are being ironed out. We hope that this will improve the quality (to an even higher standard than at present, of course); but we also hope that the community basis on which it is built on will not be swamped out by commercialism. Sure, the commercial aspects are very important. But if we put the cart before the horse and don't build on a solid community foundation this site could just end up sterile and uninteresting. We know everything isn't perfect at present - it takes time to keep things up to date and hooked together smoothly - which is difficult on a part-time amateur basis. Nevertheless we hope that even at present there is enough here to make people come back and to attract new surfers. We have great plans for the future using experience gained over the last year - you ain't seen nothin' yet! Commercial advantage will arise naturally if the site becomes one that people want to have a look at regularly for basic information about Castlebar - whether they're in Castlebar or abroad or elsewhere in Ireland.

Any comments? - via guest book or by e-mail.

We have passed the 50,000 mark with requests from over 50 countries

Doras awarded their prestigious 5-shamrock award to the Castlebar Web site. Castlebar's very own domain www.castlebar.ie is now serving Internet requests at a rate of over 300 per day from around the world. Over 23,000 successful requests have been served from the site in the first three months of 1998. Since our web statistics began in June 1997 to the end of March there were over 50,000 requests from all over the world. The graph is climbing steadily with 9,500 hits per month in March. These requests have come from 1,100+ different Internet Hosts around the world and over 50 countries.

Choose a country around the world and there seem to be people interested in Castlebar there. We have had hits from at least 52 different countries. Take your pick from North to South:- from Sweden to Australia, Norway to South Africa. From East to West:- Canada to the Phillipines; Neighbours:- like Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, Israel and Egypt or Singapore and Malaysia. Baltic countries:- Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Indeed all of Eastern Europe seems to be knocking on our door:- Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Macedonia and Yugoslavia. From hot to cold:- Indonesia to Iceland, and Costa Rica to Finland. Hot to hot:- Brazil to Bahrain. High up :- Austria and Switzerland; and low down countries:- Netherlands and Belgium; Island nations:- such as Cyprus, and incredibly, there are even Castlebar people out in the Indian Ocean- Patrick Rogan from Glenhest is married in the Seychelles!. We have oriental visitors:- Japan, Taiwan, South Korea. They even look at our web site in Middle Eastern sultanates and emirates:- Oman and UAE and way down under the New Zealand Antipodeans have a look - there are a few kiwis in Castlebar though (hi! to the Bucktons). our most recent new country is Uruguay. Of course most of our web site hits come from our own native Irish, and emigrants in the USA, UK, Canada and European Union country from countries such as France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Italy. That's over 50 countries mentioned! Finally, there are the virtual nations from exotic domains such as dotorg, dotnet, dotedu, dotcom, dotgov and even dotmil (US military). Now why are the US military interested?!

We had to fight hard to get the pure www.castlebar.ie domain name in the first place - Castlebar is one of the few towns to have managed this. Most other towns were not allowed to register the town name without some qualification. It was achieved thanks to the great co-operation between the UDC and the Castlebar Chamber of Commerce and the magnificent community effort for the Information Age Competition. Now we need to build on this to keep it up to date. So get on-line at home or in the Information Age Centre on Ellison Street (it's still there) or Castlebar Library and have a look yourself. Written contributions of all sorts are welcome to help keep the site up to date and interesting. They can be e-mailed tomayoedit@iol.ie

The Castlebar Chamber of Commerce and the Information Age Town Committee is now putting together a Skills Register aimed at promoting new industries in Castlebar.