Water Valley Community Website Commercial and Community Listings
In the spring of 2008, the Water Valley Community website received an overhaul. While not so much a redesign as a clean-up of the site with the intention of making it easier to maintain, one section of the website touched upon was the “Community Sponsors and Area Businesses” section. At some point in time before the new webmaster took over, a few Water Valley area businesses paid $100 to place their business cards on this section of the website.
As part of the overhaul, the new webmaster added a “click counter” on the business cards of those businesses who had websites of their own. Rather than jumping directly to the website of that business, a click on their business card sends a request to the Water Valley webserver, which makes a record of the click before returning the address of the website back to the person who clicked the card. This gives us an approximate measure of how effective it is to have a business card on the Water Valley website.
Between June of 2008 and the end of January 2009, the five business currently affected by the click counter have each received between 261 and 386 “clicks”. What does that mean? Well, some of those clicks are from Internet search engines, which is a good thing. However, others of those clicks are probably from spam bots searching the net for email addresses to send spam to. That’s perhaps not such a good thing. But we can also see that many of the clicks are from addresses such as “dialup.telus.net” and “shawcable.net”. Those sound a little closer to home. While it is very difficult to draw firm conclusions, it is quite possible that out of 300 clicks, as many as 200 are by people who are actually interested in seeing what is at the other end of the link attached to each business card. Perhaps 20 to 30 people a month went looking for information about those businesses. In our small community, that is a signifigant number.
Where is all this complicated explanation leading?
It’s time to update and expand the listings on the website. If you have a business in the Water Valley area, you too can have your business card on the website. We charge $100 per year, which goes to defray the cost of running the website and paying for our domain name as well as the cost of operating the Water Valley Community Association. If you have a website or you’d like your email address linked directly to your business card, we’ll keep track of each time someone clicks your card, and you’ll receive a quarterly report detailing the number of clicks. Hard to beat… you can get some pretty good exposure for your business and support your community at the same time!
To get your business card displayed on the website you can start the process by sending email to . Note that it is not a requirement that you have a website before putting your business card up on the website.