This is is asimple history of the initial WA Online rollout site, Bunbury Online and Bunbury Real Estate Guide.
The next WA Online sites are Busselton Online (January 2005), Alice Springs Online (March 2005) and Darwin Online (March 2005). All sites will contain local real estate guides.
Potted history is as follows -
28 October 2004 - Bunbury Online Dominating Search Engines:
Bunbury Online continues its rapid rise up the search engine rankings and today we've rated a new high.
On Google, the hardest search engine to achieve rankings, Bunbury Online not only has reached top spot in several search areas but now totally dominates these searches. For example if you go to Google and do a search for Bunbury webcam, ALL TEN page 1 listings are for Bunbury Online. Go to page 2 and eight of the ten listings there are for Bunbury Online. In fact, in this category 18 of the first 19 listings are for Bunbury Online.
Watch this space to see us hit Number 1 in just about every search for Bunbury.
27 October 2004 - Alice Springs Online:
WA Online announces that it has contracted with the Tangentyere Council to build Alice Springs Online with a launch date of March 2005.
The Alice Springs Online site will be modelled on the Bunbury Online site but will include the additions of a major corporate site for the Tangentyere Council, a directory of Central Australia Aboriginal organisations, Government agencies represented in Alice Springs and a directory of all healthcare and welfare organisations available in the Central Australia area. Previously there has been no "one stop shop" for this information.
A major feature of the Alice Springs Online site will be the inclusion of an online art store which will feature the paintings of local Aboriginal watercolour artists in the tradition of Albert Namatjira. The WA Online system will automatically generate invoices for the Council art business operation and process the purchase and receipt for the client and will produce shipping documents for the Council business unit. But what is extra special about the WA Online software is the ability for the Tangentyere Council to invite other art outlets or communities onto their Alice Springs Online site and our software will build (using "store-builder" technology) separate e-commerce presences for each of the art outlets and therefore create an art shopping mall.
As such, we are creating for the Tangentyere Counci the ability to own their own online art shopping centre with individual stores that they can (automatically build and) sublet to other operators.
26 October 2004 - Busselton Online:
Busselton Online, the second of WA Online's Western Australian information websites, will be live in January 2005.
The Busselton Online site will develop on the initial Bunbury Site adding a raft of new features. In addition to the existing real estate and business/organisation modules Busselton will include an e-commerce store-builder facility and a totally new online tourist module which will include local tour information, events, attractions, food and restaurants, flight bookings, car hire and a major online accommodation booking system.
The Online Booking System being developed by WA Online will be initially offered to local tourist organisation in each of the WA rollout sites but should the local operator not wish to pursue such a venture WA Online will operate the booking service directly with each accommodation operator via its national affiliations.
Following the Busselton Online rollout all of the new features will be included into Bunbury Online and the process of replicating our local sites around Western Australia will begin.
20 October - Bunbury site statistics
Today we had 345 new and unique visitors to the Bunbury Online site. Don't be misled by people quoting the number of hits their site has had, but just for the record, so far in October we've had almost 270,000.
Our visitors are largely from Australia but we've had people visit the site from over 70 other countries with the highest hit rate from the USA, Britain, Japan and Singapore. We are currently working hard to build our search engine reach into the key markets of South Africa and Zimbabwe.
We've also had around 4250 search engine robot hits on the site from just Google, MSN, Inktomi, InternetSeer and Ask Jeeves alone. Expect to see Bunbury Online continue its march up the search engine rankings this month .... and we're already number 1 on a couple of key Google searches.
10 October 2004 - Bunbury Real Estate:
Bunbury Online has approached an initial round of Bunbury real estage agents to feature their properties in the Bunbury Real Estate Guide, one of the major features of the Bunbury Online rollout.
The real estate module developed by WA Online is the equal or better than any of the major national real estate sites and gives local real estate agents the ability to have their listings found in one central Bunbury location. No longer does an internet user try and locate the list of Bunbury real estate agents and then attempt to find each of their sites and manually build a list of properties of interest. Additionally the Bunbury Real Estate Guide is typically faster that the national guides (with independent servers for each WA town or city) and is also cheaper. Initially seven Bunbury real estate agents have been approached to use this service and all have enthusiastically welcomed the new facility and joined Bunbury Online.
April 2004 - Bunbury Online is born
The Bunbury and WA Online concepts are born and coding begins with an anticipated launch date of October 2004 for Bunbury Online and a rollout of other WA sites in 2005.
The WA Online project is being developed by the Bunbury based technology operation Sky (Australia) Pty Ltd. Sky registers the name WA Online Pty Ltd and prepares for ownership of the WA Online project to be transferred to WA Online Pty Ltd in early 2005.
WA Online secures domain registration in the form of "Town Online" for the following Western Australian centres -
Broome, Bunbury, Busselton, Carnarvon, Collie, Coral Bay, Dampier, Derby, Esperance, Exmouth, Fremantle, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie, Karratha, Kununurra, Mandurah, Manjimup, Margaret River, Moora, Northam, Perth, Port Hedland and Wyndham.