Historical Highlights
Matt and Carolyn Smith formed their first Internet company in March 1995. They soon began producing Internet "TownCenter" Websites for a number of South Florida communities. Over the next several years as they became increasingly preoccupied with producing sites for and providing consulting services to some very large organizations, the local community sites project was set aside.
After selling their Internet site design and consulting business to a publicly traded company, in April 2002 they founded HTL, Inc. in order to return to their original idea of using the World Wide Web to provide extremely localized information.
The new HomeTownLocator® Gazetteer that they developed was well received - especially by the academic community and librarians. The site was selected as the feature-of-the-month by the New York State Library and it also received a very nice review by The Internet Scout Project at the University of Wisconsin.
The site continues to be popular. As of December 12, 2007, there were 108,000 references to HomeTownLocator in the Google database (excluding internal references from HomeTownLocator.com) but including 267 .edu sites and 3,450 .org sites that make reference to HomeTownLocator.
Website Ranking: Top 2%
A "snapshot" of the Website ranking for HomeTownLocator.com taken on December 12, 2007 showed the following:
- Quantcast.com (which directly measures our traffic) ranked the site as 1,947 out of 20,267,977 sites evaluated.
- Compete.com ranked the site as 3,062.
- Ranking.com ranked the site as 10,020
- The Netcraft Toolbar ranked the site as 15,379.
- Alexa.com ranked the site as 49,402.
How many website are there? In November 2007, Netcraft.com found 65 million active websites around the world. If we assume that at least 96% of these sites are vanity and "wanna-be" sites, then there might be 2.6 million serious websites with some hope of attracting a reasonable audiance.
If there are 2.6 million serious sites, than any site that ranks in the top 50,000 would be in the top 2% of all serious websites. By all ranking systems, HomeTownLocator.com ranks in the top 2% based on the numnber of monthly visitors.
US State Gazetteers (Launched in December 2007)
- Profiles for 166,000 cities, towns, neighborhoods and subdivisions
- Maps, data and directions for 1.7 million physical, cultural and historical features
www.HomeTownLocator.com & www.HTL-Weather.com
With the launch of the State Gazetteers, the original US Gazetteer, (http://www.HomeTownLocator.com), now acts as access point to the State Gazetteers. In aggregate, the State Gazetteers have 4 times the content that our first gazetteer had.
We also host our own weather site which provides Local Weather - almost anywhere! - Find current and forecast weather conditions for local, national and international locations including 4,300 airports in 200 countries. Info includes local times for sunrise and sunset.
