The Sligo Town website, formerly known as Sligo Town on the Net, celebrated its 13th anniversary recently, a mini milestone for a personal website which has tried to spread the word of Sligo‘s existence, and to put Sligo onto the tourist map. though over the years, the websites popularity has grown way beyond anything we had envisiged.
The Sligo Town website came into existense on 11th November 2002, after the sites owner, Chris Ridley, grew frustrated with the official stance taken by the state-owned tourism company Bord Failte, which concentrates its efforts solely on Dublin, Cork, Killarney and Galway, it was as if Sligo and the rest of the country either didn’t exist, or weren’t worth mentioning to prospective tourists.
My thinking was, “if we’re going to wait for Bord Failte to entice the tourists to come to Sligo, we’re going to be waiting pne hell of a long time, So I’ll just have to have a go at doing it myself.
So my project started, and little did I know what I was letting myself in for. I looked around Sligo town and county and made a list of all the local tourist attractions, I started reading up on their history and I put all this information into my computer, then I went out, tramped the streets of Sligo taking numerous photographs of all the attractions, and on my travels, found some more interesting sights which weren’t previously documented. Then I started to formulate ways in which all this information could be presented on a website.
After all the research and photographic work was done, the website paging structure was coded, a few web pages were written, the domain name sligotown.net was registered and The Sligo Town Website was quietly launched in Novmber 2002, and the rest, as they say, is history.
After a slow start, the popularity suddenly started to grow in popularity, it bacame so popular in fact, that it hit the staggering figure of one and a quarter million hits in a twelve month period several years ago.
Having gone through a number of visual and technical changes over the years, the website has finally settled on unique styling technique developed and written by site owner Chris Ridley which allows a semi-transparent text layer to sit over a story relevant photographic background, which can be different for each individual page on the website, a totally unique approach to web design.
At the same time we made another very major change within the website, by completely changing direction and moved away from the tourist element the website previously adhered to, and went instead for a more attraction/historical approach, and deleting all links to tourism establishments within the town.
So there you have it, a look at the history of the Sligo Town website, a work which has been done single-handedly for the past 13 years, though if anybody would like to contribute their texts, stories, photographs or suggestions for the website, please feel free to contact us via our
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