About Bill ColemanWell as you've probably surmised by now, my name is Bill Coleman. My family has vacationed on the Alabama Gulf Coast since 1990, and we've lived full time (not at the same time of course!) in five condos and homes in both Orange Beach and Gulf Shores.
My favorite outdoor activity here is fishing. While I enjoy deep sea and inshore fishing from a boat, if I had to pick a favorite method, it would be surf fishing. I am still amazed at what can be pulled from the Gulf of Mexico while wading in the water or resting in a beach chair. I also never get tired of walking on the beach or learning about local history. Like most of my projects, beginning this website wasn't the result of a lot of thought. I often read where a website developer has contemplated building a site for months, even years, before he registers a domain name. That's not me. Prior to this site, I had an outdoors blog that was getting decent traffic. While working on my blog I came across an ad for a website host and just before I went to sleep that night I thought about what I had read. The next day I began learning how to build a website. I found out quickly that websites are much different than blogs. Whereas I was blogging within minutes after coming up with a name for it, I went through a ten day learning curve to register my domain name and write a homepage. Gulf Shores Travel Guide went live on the Internet on December 19, 2008. Now, three years later, this site is over 300 pages, all of it original and most of it written by me. Website traffic, a product of content quantity and quality builds slow. Statistics say that most site owners never get past 50 uniques per day, on average. I think my site has gotten better with time because I stayed the course and went back over all of my pages written the first year and improved them. Last summer this site was drawing 800 - 900 unique visitors per day. Total page views for July was 48,243. This summer I expect to go over the 1000 mark for uniques and substantially pass 50,000 page views for July (as most people reading this will know, the best month for tourism in Gulf Shores). During the last three years, I have engaged in other projects, among them several other websites and a recently published local history book. Gulf Shores Travel Guide remains not only my main priority, but my favorite place to write. It's just plain fun to spend time on this site because so many people love the Alabama Gulf Coast and enjoy reading about it. If you have any questions about this site or the Alabama Gulf Coast ask at "Questions." I also have a very active Twitter account (AlabamaGulf) and a very popular Facebook page (Gulf Shores Travel Guide).
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