The Fun Portal officially started on August 27, 2000, with the launch of OkieSurf.com. Dallas Happy Hour, Discount Hotel USA, and a few other hotel and New Orleans fun blogs were quickly built, and we were officially living the dot-com dream.
For the first few years we ran these websites, we were able to rank them on the first page of Google for some competitive, high-traffic keywords. Our Hotel.com reseller sites, along with a little direct ad sales, reached just under $1,000 a month in revenue and generated around 100,000 visitors per month in total traffic.
It was still a side project even in those early days. Then Hurricane Katrina hit, our servers went down for about a month, and we lost most of our hotel SEO rankings.
Over the next few years, the Portal of Fun didn't receive much attention as we all had other priorities in life. For me, that meant being a father and getting a "real job" for a few years.
Now that my kid is in college, the Portal of Fun is once again back in action. We still don't have any of the hotel sites back up and running with significant traffic, but our Texas Fun blogs are starting to generate SEO traffic again.
A big part of the passion behind bringing all of this back is building up our YouTube channel and creating more original content around the places, events, and things we enjoy.
The copy and the sites are still a little rough around the edges, but I get a chance to improve them every business quarter, and the traffic continues to improve.
Winter 2023
I learned to fix computers and code at an early age, and spend a modest amount of time on the computer in high school in college, but was a Political Science major and very briefly enrolled in law School. Then the dot com boom hit. I packed my bags for Californai, and I got suckerd into becoming an IT consultant. In the early days I mainly fixed computers and computer networks. Over the years I have become a web developer and run digital marketing campaigns.
Craig and his team have been a great choice. Not only is he good at both basic and advanced coding, but he also helps with website search optimization so visitors can find your website on a Google Search. He has been responsive to phone calls and emails, and good at answering questions in layman's terms.
David
Craig was outstanding to work with on this project. We needed someone who could resolve technical errors within our site to improve SEO and Craig delivered! Our site went from a health score in the low 80's to 95.
Kim Owner
Firecane Digitial has greatly helped us expand our websites productivity and increase our profits. It's always a pleasure working with them. Craig is very creative, responsive and efficient in solving our companies programming needs. First rate!
Jeff
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