It is a great pleasure to see that the website has today passed the 100,000 page views mark and it is growing in both strength and numbers, as well as very importantly, building a community of like-minded individuals within the Whitegoods trade.
The truly amazing thing is though that, even springing from the Whitegoods Mailing list, which is still very much alive and kicking, this has been accomplished in a little over three months from the launch of the website.
It has brought closer the manufacturers, work providers and repairers and at times offers a unique insight into the workings of each party. Almost all the posts and information is of great interest and of use to us all to help create a better understanding in the industry and to, hopefully, breed more tolerance and better working relationships for everyone.
The thing to remember is though that this is your community and website! You all contributed and have made it a valuable commodity as well as steering the course of it for the most part. So if you wish to applaud anyone for this effort, applaud yourselves.
My thanks goes to the people that work tirelessly behind the scenes for what is often thankless tasks like Dave Conway, Kevin Heath, Neil Howieson amongst others. Your contributions, help and guidance have been invaluable and appreciated over the past few months to both myself and the many people that use the website.
The past few months have seen some radical moves in the industry and some surprises and twists along the way, MFI deciding to go direct and use agents who have done this in an extremely professional manner and have earned a huge amount of respect from us all I’m sure. As well as the public announcement of Network DASA, a network that is designed to help repairers and manufacturers or insurers alike and build a better foundation for service work for independents in the UK for the future. I wish these endeavours every success for the future.
As for the site there is some remarkable figures returned from the site statistics, this month alone has seen the site for the first time break 30,000 page views in one month as well as having our busiest day ever on the 12/09/2003 with 3121 page views in a single day! Which, to me, only highlights the passion of the people that are using the site and the high level of interest in the topics on the agenda?
We have also seen the first ever UK Whitegoods meeting in Peterborough this month which I feel and, hope others do too, was productive and worthy of the effort and hopefully there will be more over time.
So thank you everyone for your comments, posts, help and advice and all the efforts that have gone into this website and the group in general and hopefully it will continue far into the future and contribute to making this an industry that we can all be proud to work in.
K.