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About Our Site - How We Ended Up Barefoot In Maui"How did we end up Barefoot In Maui?" To tell you about our site requires a little background history, which we will get to in a minute. Nine anniversaries and three boys later, we love Maui just as much now (if not a little more) than we did the first time we went!
Put simply, we weren't able find a Maui vacation website that was written from a family's perspective. So we decided to share our experiences with others from that point of view, hoping that many of you would find the information helpful.
In a nutshell, Site Build It helped us build this website from the ground up, without having the knowledge of a computer programmer or HTML guru (not that we have anything against those very smart people). Please watch following video (click on the image below) that will clearly demonstrate why we chose Site Build It over every other option. We think you will find this worthwhile:
A Little Background In 1997, my wife and I had been married three months. In celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary, her grandparents planned a trip in Maui. Fortunately for us, they wanted to take the whole family along. With two grandparents, two parents, one aunt and future uncle, two cousins, and 4 siblings (one was serving a mission for our church and couldn't attend) we had a lot of fun. Grandpa and Grandma not only extended the invitation but became the best "tour specialists" one could ask for. Grandpa spent over six months researching travel arrangements and accommodations for a dozen people coming from three states. His extensive planning and coordination of everyone's schedule earned him the ongoing nickname of "The Colonel." Grandma was so organized she was prepared for any possible need or want. What she couldn't bring she bought locally. Together they provided activities, games and more fabulous meals than anyone could ever eat. We thought the trip would be a time to honor them and their fifty years of marriage. It turned out they gave more to us. They introduced us to this beautiful piece of paradise known as Maui. Our love of the island, culture and people has only grown over the years. We will always be grateful for their generous heart, hard work and amazing taste in vacation sites.
Last year (2005) I had several conversations with one of my younger brothers who builds and maintains several of his own websites for a living (one of those HTML gurus). He basically became a successful, self-taught expert through many hundreds of hours of online research over a year's time. This started my wife and I thinking about building our own website, and asking ourselves, What niche could we write about that wasn't already taken? I had some HTML language training in school some years ago, but I knew I was essentially at the amateur level when it came to knowing how to build a functioning, easy-to-use website that would also rank high enough at the major search engines to attract a large number visitors. I first considered asking my brother to help me, but I realized that I would be asking for a lot of his help and a lot of his time. At this time, he was thinking about creating an off-line manual showing step-by-step how to create your own website based on his own research, but it would not be finished for several more months. My next thought was what if there was something like an online "manual" already out there? After doing some Google-based research, I came upon Site Build It! or SBI!, an online suite of tools, tutorials and "building blocks" that allowed us to create the beginnings of what we hope to be a successful website. The online SBI! Action Guide gives you a free "inside" look at the Guide that we used to brainstorm and then create our website.
Alexa is an Amazon.com-owned, Google-powered tool that ranks active websites based on a variety of factors, including incoming traffic. Our homepage went online January 11, 2006. Within a few weeks and 20+ pages later, our first Alexa ranking came in at around 355,000 out of approximately 56,000,000 active websites. (Lower the number, the better the ranking.) Needless to say we were very excited about this. It has since improved to the ranking that you see below:
This places us in the top 1% of all websites. Our goal is to get into the top 1/4% of all websites (i.e., an Alexa ranking better than/below 100,000). To be clear, SBI! is not a get-rich-quick scheme at any level. The process requires much work as we strive to add more quality content, but here's proof that SBI! works. There's a certain passion and excitement we have when writing and sharing with others about a place, culture and a people that have become near and dear to us. We have enjoyed many wonderful family experiences here that have become memories to last a lifetime.
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