10 years ago ProKick.com was independently ranked by goggle at the No. 25.000.000 YES that’s right ranked over the 25th millionth web-site, now ProKick.com is ranked the 300 thousandth in the world, yes that is the entire world. That’s remarkable when you start to consider the mind-bogglingly vast number of sites in the world. We’re aiming to be one of the top 100,000. That day is coming!

The Belfast kickboxing website ProKick.com is proving to be more of a hit on the world-wide web than homegrown football, rugby and most political sites on the internet. Since we relaunched a year ago this week, http://www.prokick.com has soared past the IFA, Sport NI, the Sports council and Ulster rugby sites to become one of the top three sports web-site in Northern Ireland.

Despite limited resources in a sport still viewed by many sports administrators as niche. We’ve always known the value of a great, easily used website. We started the first site in 1997 when many organisations thought online was a fad.

The site has been through a few incarnations since then until now and we are still improving functions for our users. It’s a vital part of what we do. It spreads news of events of club membership details. It started essentially, as a bulletin board and grew. There is now a great spot for audio and video and we have introduced ProKick email address, RSS feeds with syndicated content powered by FeedBurner, we have also started a comment section where members can comment on any article and so far that is proving a big hit. Our web master DarlyCampbell.com is looking into allowing fight fans to construct their own Facebook-style profiles, setting up their own daily Blogs and chat forums and games.

The site had meant we could rhapsodise to the world about the great things happening in kickboxing in Northern Ireland – and helped establish Belfast as one of the most important kickboxing cities in Europe. And we are not finished yet.

A big thanks to all our skeleton staff Daryl, me and Fran and of course our new breed of kickboxers that add value with constructive comments and you the web surfer, fight fan which ever style and if you are just reading this by mistake, I thank you too!

 

Billy Murray reporting for ProKick.com