loquax is three years old this week. in february 1998 there were four pages of competitions on a demon homepage. the old fashioned counter we put on the front page clocked up to 300 in the first weekend thanks to the support and interest of the fine folks on the uk competitions newsgroup.

a year later on 8 february 1999 the site served 6000 page views in one day. another year later on 8 february 2000 the site served 18000 page views having tripled in size in a year. yesterday the site served 49000 page views, not quite tripled again in the last year to a point where we are dealing with close to one and a half million page views each month and there are currently around a thousand distinct pages of content.

without more than a whisper of advertising we’ve built a sustainable profitable dot com company. i’m damned proud of that. my role in loquax is the minor one, i wrote all the back end database structure, programmed endless utility functions, argued about navigation into the small hours, i handle some fun things like getting to tell people they’ve won prizes from win on the web and some less fun things like making sure the tax man gets his share. jason does the major life consuming work - all the day to day content updating, design, marketing and everything that keeps the show running.

the “wow, we’ve made it!” moment was undoubtedly when we took the net magazine’s reader’s choice award in february 2000, a great second birthday present. we advertised that fact widely for month’s afterwards, it meant a lot. the same magazine later listed us as the 45th best website of all time. Guinness, CNN and MSN filled the three places below us. we’ve had so many mentions in the press that we’ve given up keeping track of them. when you open the internet section of a newspaper and it doesn’t surprise you to find your own website listed you know you’ve achieved something.

loquax will continue to grow and thrive, we plan to move to a bigger better server very shortly, we have businesses lining up to partner with us. many thanks are due to our excellent web hosts positive for putting up with our growth, and to all our users over the past three years. we didn’t have a clue what we were getting into when we kicked the site off, it’s been educational, it’s been dazzling, it’s been inspiring, it’s been scary, at some points it’s been downright infuriating, but it’s almost always been fun. while dot com bubbles have been bursting and sites failing on a daily basis we’ve stayed and prospered. i can’t help but wonder where the site will be in another three years.

cheers!