Because of the uncertainty in the beginning of the 2001 season due to foot & mouth disease many holiday parks/campsites did not feel that they wanted to spend money on advertising so we suffered as well, because believe it or not if they want to be listed with more details they have to pay a very modest charge for being on this web site. The reduced income meant that we had to concentrate our resources on other things - hence the changes we started on have not yet been completed.  In the meantime it's all still there, albeit a little untidy. In addition to that we have just moved to another server which means that some features (technical only) are not available at this time.

The 2002 season was little better for us although by all accounts very successful for the campsites. More and more campers were using the internet to find campsites and the McCoy guide according to the web statistics had a record number of hits. We also had feedback from the campsite owners that confirmed that the McCoy Guide was working for them.

Especially galling were the campsite owners who complained that some detail was incorrect on their FREE listing (phone number usually) and the wrong number was getting LOTS of telephone calls.  That proves the McCoy Guide was working yet I was expected to change the details for them FREE of charge and NO they were not prepared to pay for a listing. My reaction was simply to delete the campsite from our database, after all I couldn't stay on their site (camp) for free so why should they expect to stay on my site (web) for free?

Anyway the upshot is this: The McCoy Guide has come out of hibernation and goes on for it's fifth season to be upgraded and improved. 

Delays on the Net

The web is getting overloaded right now because of the phenomenal growth of new users. You must expect considerable delays, especially in the evening between 7-10pm. To make matters worse the US (being 5 hours or so behind us) log on after 10pm. Earlier in the year we said Freeserve was overloaded because of the vast number of users. It is our contention now, however, that they are probably the fastest around. Having said that vast number of users sometimes try to log on all at once. It happened to us (April 01) whilst testing the new site listings layout. It took 45 seconds to download the Northumberland page of listings but only 5 seconds using another ISP within a few minutes. Now we have designed the new listings for the quickest download possible so it was an eye opener for us too.  It is our suggestion that you sign up with an alternative ISP as well in case of problems.  Whatever you do don't blame us if the site listing pages take forever to load - in good times you shouldn't have to wait for a whole page of listings for more than 30 seconds and considerably less (5-10secs) for the new listings. Just thought you might like you know this! As for the free (call charge) internet access we have not signed up yet because time is precious and we can't wait forever when surfing. It is time the ISP's got their act together, it seems to us they prefer for the free call charge (it's not free, you still have to pay monthly) to be slow and inefficient - it deters their customers from staying online too long, they get bored and log off.

Page updated on 28 May 2005

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