by Brent Eades
Some readers may know that besides looking after the Millstone website I also run the Almonte.com site. It occurred to me recently that it’s been 30 years since I launched its first version — I can’t recall exactly what month that was, but it was around now.
It began as a learning exercise — the World Wide Web was new then, I worked in communications, and I wanted to figure out how this stuff worked. As for a subject: Almonte, where I’d lived for eight years by then, was a natural choice.
If no one visited the site (as seemed likely in those days before most people were online) well, I’d at least have a new set of skills in my toolkit. And who knows, maybe this Web thing would catch on.
At first it wasn’t actually ‘almonte.com’ — back then many sites used addresses provided by their web hosting companies and it was something like http://mars.on.ca/~almonte. I forget exactly now. I do recall that to set up the website I had to drive to a guy’s house in Ottawa to pick up the required software on floppy discs. He ran his hosting business from a room in his basement.
In 1997 I considered making the site more ‘official’ by registering the almonte.com domain name. Almonte was still a separate municipality then — there was no Mississippi Mills — and I contacted town staff to ask if they might want the first crack at registering it.
Not surprisingly, they didn’t. More years would pass before having a Web presence was standard for most communities. I registered the name and I own it still.
The first versions of the site were rudimentary by today’s standards. It was light on photos because those could take a long time to download on the dialup Internet connections most folks had then, and Web technology generally was primitive.
Around 2000 I came across an online collection of historic photos of Almonte, curated by the late Michael Dunn. I asked him if I could share them on my site, to which he graciously agreed. Some years later he provided me with higher quality versions, and they remain a cornerstone of the site, almost 700 of them.
Since then I’ve created several new iterations of Almonte.com, with a growing focus on destinations for visitors — where to shop, eat, stay and visit — and on local artists.
While the site has no official connection with the municipality, town staff do occasionally ask me to share important information about Almonte with the public, such as during the recent infrastructure rebuilding on and around Mill Street. I continue to pay for the site’s costs from my own pocket.
Depending on the time of year, Almonte.com receives between 3,000 and 4,000 visitors a month. It also usually comes up in first spot in Google search results. It seems to be doing OK.
As for the future of the site: I have no particular plans at the moment. I’ll continue to try and ensure it lists destinations of interest to visitors, and no doubt I’ll undertake more redesigns at some point. But for now I’m reasonably content with the site as it is.
Anyway, if you haven’t happened upon the site before, please do stop by for a visit: https://almonte.com/
