Backyard Oahu - About the Website

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About this Website

Mission Statement

Backyard Oahu is dedicated to providing information on hiking and backpacking the Koolau and Waianae mountains and valleys on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Background & Statistics

Backyard Oahu has been in existance and publically-accessible since 1998 but remained relatively unknown on the Internet for several years. The website's visitor count by Summer 2000 was less than 12,000 visitors/year.

In 2002, the website was picked up by major Internet directories such as Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Google, and Altavista. As well as spreading Backyard Oahu's presence across the U.S., this dramatically increased exposure on an international level. Since, web-surfers from nearly every country in the world have visited Backyard Oahu.

Today, BackyardOahu.com features information on over 80 established trails on Oahu, averages nearly 130,000 unique visitors/year, and incurs well over 5.3 million hits/year. Anually, approximately 44.5 gigabytes of information are downloaded from the website.

History

Backyard Oahu was started by Greg Kingsley as a personal project during the early summer of 1998. It was originally named Hawaii Hiking Trail Information, located at the URL http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gkingsle (inactive), and initially included 12 trails.

In the fall of 1998, the website's name was changed to Backyard Oahu - Oahu's Hiking Trails. However, on September 9, 1998, the site's original webhost - ohana.com (panworld.net) - closed for business, forcing the relocation of Backyard Oahu onto Greg's personal account on the University of Hawaii severs (hence the hawaii.edu address).

The trail database slowly began to grow and several topics related to hiking on Oahu were written. The subjects included hiking tips, weather, geography, and so forth, all of which are still available today.

By April 1999, the number of hiking trails featured on Backyard Oahu had risen to 37 trails. However, at this point it was still considered a "personal project" and, in November 1999, work to expand and edit the website began to slow. That is, until it was learned through a little curiosity (and the website's access logs) that the general Internet public had been clicking in, not just acquantances of the author. This was resultant of, as the logs also revealed, the website having been indexed by online search engines.

Realizing this newfound public exposure the website emerged from dormancy with a "reborn", more serious purpose. No longer was it merely to catalog personal adventures and photography only for friends and family, it was to spread the word and experiences of hiking on Oahu for all to learn. On September 3, 2001, the first of trail page revisions were published while several hiking topics were added. Information was appended, revised, and expanded upon including addition of property/landowner information, news, pictures, and other details.

By September 2001, site traffic had increased slightly to approximately 14,000 visitors/year. However, being no longer involved with University of Hawaii, the loss of the personal account on the hawaii.edu server forced the need to find a new home for Backyard Oahu by the end of 2001. But the size of the website, the need for certain server services, and the general distaste of "forced" advertising (i.e. pop-ups, huge banner advertising all over the page) prohibted use of free website services. In January 2002, the decision was made to move the website to its own domain on the Internet and reprogramming tasks began. The website was now finally on its own and officially transferred to its self-titled domain (backyardoahu.com) on June 9, 2002.

Today, BackyardOahu.com continues to grow with the addition of news and data to the individual trails as well as maintaining the Hawaii Hiking Trails Forum and adding trail photography to the photo collection and ways are always sought to expand the knowledge, increase the learning, and maintain current information throughout the site.

A Note on General Advertising

Backyard Oahu has always been non-profit. The website and all the information/ pictures collected and shared were never published with the intent to profit. Additionally, so that the website experience is not diminished we use only minimal advertising.

However, the little advertising we do (compared to most websites) does help to offset some of the costs of keeping the website up and running. Costs include webhosting/Internet fees, photo processing (in the "old" days) and digital camera equipment, graphics-related software, and so forth. While we are happy to pay these out-of-pocket we are also appreciative of the small monetary support we drive from the outside vendors we link to.

If you are interested in supporting the website, consider buying a hiking book or other Hawaii-related literature from Hawaii Hiking Books. Don't see a book you like? Try this amazon.com search box.

If it's not a book you're looking for, try one of the links on the right. Provided you click on one of them, BackyardOahu.com will receive a portion of the proceeds on whatever you buy or subscribe. Of course, you can always bookmark BackyardOahu.com and click through us if you decide to buy something later! (Just remember to come back to BackyardOahu.com first!)

Small Company Advertising

While we prefer to avoid placing large-scale ads on individual trail pages, we would consider small company and store ads on very specific pages. For example, if you are a local ice cream shop or eatery near a trailhead, we think that would be a terrific addition to a hiker's day! Contact us through the feedback form!

Website Status & News

For recent updates to this website or to make suggestions or report problems, visit the Backyard Oahu News & Suggestions forum in Hawaii Hiking Trails Forum ( http://forum.backyardoahu.com ).

You can also subscribe to these discussion threads to receive e-mail notifications whenever there are significant changes to Backyard Oahu.