Ancient history (2007-2008)
In 2007, besford.org was just two holding pages. It seemed unlikely that anybody would visit. But in the year to August 2008, the site generated over 600 visits with over 1,000 page views. There were at least 200 unique visitors. That’s quite a lot for a site with absolutely no content. Most of the visits were from people directly entering the URL, or searching for ‘besford’ using Google. Most visitors were from the UK (90%), followed by USA, Greece, Serbia, Spain, and 16 other countries.
Experimenting with content (2008-2012)
Why were all these people turning up? As an experiment to see who came here and why, the public besford.org website was updated to include some random content relating to any interpretation of ‘Besford’ as a place or a name. This generated 20,000 page views from over 5,000 unique visitors. Typically, visitors looked at 3 pages before leaving. 57% found the site using Google (and 20% of them just searched for 'besford'). Although mainly from the UK, visitors came from Serbia, USA, Macedonia, Australia, and over 80 other countries!Finally we go social (2012-present)
By 2012, having gone four years without any changes, besford.org was starting to look very stale. The world had changed a lot. [For example, back in 2008, Twitter had just got a second round of financing and had about 1 million users. By 2012 it celebrated its sixth birthday and had 140 million users.] So it was time for a relaunch, with most of the old content and lots more up-to-date features. The site is now dynamically generated, so it can change depending on how it gets used, and has commenting, social sharing, mobile-optimised pages, and other goodies. Let's see where this next step takes us!
You must have too much time on your hands.
Not true unfortunately! besford.org was put together using internet-based services and only took a few hours to create.
Your content is wrong! / Your content infringes my copyright!
Sorry - we’ll fix it as soon as possible. Let us know from the Contact page.
I am a Besford!
Cool, me too. There aren’t so many of us around. We'd love to hear from you so why not leave a comment on an article, or get in touch?