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Last Updated April 28h 2006
First off, a little about the reason why this webite exists. I've been a resident of Whistler since 1997, with a few breaks for travel. On one such break, I spent the 2005 New Zealand winter living in Wanaka with my girlfriend. We were very frustrated with the lack of online resources to secure a job and a place to live BEFORE we arrived. There wasn't even a forum in place to ask locals for suggestions to help us out.
As a web developer I decided to change that.
So over the winter (which wasn't a very good snow year) I spent my free time developing this website. I set it up so I could easily add the other popular New Zealand ski town of Queenstown, Whistler and perhaps more ski towns through out he world in the future. The website was ready in late October 2005 for Wanaka. By December Queenstown and Whistler were all set up with the exception of the business directories.
In bigger resorts such as Whistler, there are resources out there to find information, work, a place to live and ask questions. Our goal is to provide it all in one place.
Since most ski towns also have great mountain biking, rock climbing and other activities we decided to include those as well. The basic idea was to create a website that would be informative and useful to tourists, potential seasonal employees and locals alike. The site currently does this by providing:
- Free classifieds where locals can buy, sell, advertise or showcase their business. New arrivals and locals can look for work or a place to live.
- A directory of businesses in the area targeted.
- A forum where anyone can ask questions and discuss local matters.
- A photo gallery for users to upload their pictures.
- Weather information and links.
- Lots of information on skiing, snowboarding backcountry touring, mountain biking, rock climbing and other activities.
We are currently back in Whistler and working on the Whistler business directory. This is a big task as there are 100's of businesses in the area.
Our other task is to continue to bring in as many people to the Mountain Community website as possible and to keep them coming back. And the numbers are increasing every month. So far in April we have averaged 228 visitors per day resulting in 6865 hits. That's more then double our numbers from January! Our numbers show that approx. 38% of those users are from Canada, 43% are from Australia or New Zealand, 11% are from the USA and the remaining 8% are from everywhere else.
Most of our visitors are finding us by direct request (they type in the web address or follow a link in an email or on a webpage), but more and more users are finding us with the search engines. We will continue to improve on this.
If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.
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