I thought I would show this month's visitor figures in a slightly different format to the usual by including a totally unedited summary report for the year so far, reprinted direct from my server log analyser.

As can be seen, Wyenot.com has been extremely popular so far this year with a 4 million 'hits' mark being reached in less than eleven months and over 700,000 pages of the site being viewed by real people within the same period.

During November 2005, an average 676 people viewed 2,600 pages of the site every day. Throughout the year 2005, Wyenot.com and Wyenot News has brought an absolutely huge amount of tourism business to the area, from which every single business in the area which relies on tourism has benefited. More local business have supported me this year than in previous years and the renewal rate from those businesses still trading who supported me last year by advertising has been 100%. Not one of them has even needed to be sent a reminder! Although I am still running Wyenot.com at a personal financial loss, I do now see light at the end of the tunnel. It has been a long hard and physically exhausting struggle with eighteen hour days, several times per week but I am determined to continue because I know that very soon my efforts will begin to pay off and, as well as continuing to help everybody else, Wyenot.com will begin to reap me some benefits.

When I first started this web site I had two big disadvantages. Firstly, foot and mouth disease hit the area within months of its launch and, although the web site was bringing tourists to the town during the crisis, local internet awareness was virtually nil. Although I approached the main tourism group trying to make the area popular again with my idea, they dismissed me with an attitude indicating that I was an insignificant, silly little boy with a no hope idea.

Secondly, I had to contend with the copy cats who had more money than I and were able to throw launch parties for councillors and other 'important' people. I think after five years of genuine dedication and strong will to continue, despite the setbacks Wyenot.com has come out on top and local people have become very well aware of what works and what clearly does not. I think in fact that the misinformation readily disseminated by above mentioned group has actually done more harm than good to local business. By offering a service which was not provided or at least, provided very badly, they gave the internet in general a bad name and local business lost faith in a system which could in fact have been their saviour.

I have deliberately never gone around the local businesses pushing Wyenot.com as an advertising medium and I have never sent out monthly emails to my advertisers, supplying them with a 'monthly hits' figure which can only be described as absolute misleading rubbish. (The number of people who have shown me these emails is just incredible!) Four hundred 'hits' on an advertisement means absolutely nothing if they have all been visits by internet scanning robots and the page has never actually been seen by a human being or generated any business whatsoever for the advertiser.

I am a firm believer in allowing local people to discover this web site in the same way that the tourists themselves do. The figures below speak for themselves... Four million hits in eleven months actually equates to a little under two hundred thousand viewers. Rather than just switch off, those two hundred thousand viewers actually went on to look at over seven hundred thousand pages of the web site and all advertisers on Wyenot, especially those in the tourism industry have reported a significant increase in business as a direct result of having a page on this web site.

The thing which makes Wyenot.com work is total dedication to keeping it current and interesting to both local people and visitors alike. If the BBC showed the same episode of Eastenders every day, nobody would watch it. Wyenot News has regular readers from all continents, all parts of the UK and even in Ross-on-Wye. Building a regular readership in Ross has been by far the most difficult task to accomplish but it's getting there and when I go somewhere to take a photograph, more people are recognizing me as the Wyenot photographer, as opposed to the Ross Gazette photographer. After all, I was the Wyenot photographer first but the Ross Gazette liked my photos and started using them. I am extremely grateful to the Ross Gazette for this as I would have had to give up long ago without photo royalties keeping me afloat financially. The way it works now is that we help each other - some of my news leads come from the Gazette and some of the Gazette's come from me. Unlike the copy cats who are still out there, copying without a single idea of their own, I never go out of a Wednesday, buy a Gazette and just copy a story word for word hoping that this will increase readership. I research the news myself.

To answer the most frequent question I am asked. No I do not get paid when people visit Wyenot.com or read Wyenot News and I have never received any grants. The only money I receive from this web site is from those businesses who pay me £45 per year to advertise and the very rare, odd donation. So far, in five years, I have made £40 from donations and a little under £3,000 from advertisers. The rest has come from my own pocket.

If you take the official Herefordshire Tourism web site as an example, assuming you can find it. I have been told that the Council pay £46,000 per year to maintain that web site. If this figure is accurate (and it seems quite reasonable as they would have to employ several people to do the maintaining) I therefore calculate that in five years, had I been given the same budget I would have made £226,960 less the cost of equipment required. As it is, I have made £3,040 and spent far more than that on computer and camera equipment. As I mentioned earlier though - more local businesses are taking an interest these days, I now see light at the end of the tunnel financially and I'm absolutely determined to continue. Wyenot.com and Wyenot News are hard work but I enjoy what I do and, if you enjoy what you do, you need never 'go to work' again.