Headstand Media

BeeSource.com was started in 1998 by Barry Birkey, the brother of Headstand founder Randal Birkey. The site grew out of Barry’s interest and hobby in beekeeping (an apiarist). At that time, there we only a handful of ways for beekeepers to connect using digital technology. There was the “Bee-L” email list, I think it was run on the “Majordomo” listserv platform. There were a few websites.

Barry launched BeeSource.com on using Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB) threaded discussion board platform, adding his own static HTML coded pages to add additional site information, links and resources. Over the years, the site grew steadily in large part because of Barry’s own active interest and participation, and his skills as a fair-minded and easy going discussion moderator.

During the years that brother Randy was managing and growing his own web business as BIRKEY.COM, the brothers collaborated on various site upgrades and redesigns, always improving the site. BIRKEY.COM even hosted the site for a number of years until in 2007, it was decided to abandon the UBB engine in favor of the more popular and powerful vBulletin engine. Since this engine is built in open source PHP and MySQL technology, an outside web host was required. The old UBB site content was imported into vBulletin and the new site launched. The site performance has been noticeably better since then.

In early 2008, the site boasts almost 5,500 members worldwide, and some forums with close to 100,000 posts, with a healthy Google PageRank of 5/10. The site currently ranks #15 on the “beekeeping” search term (searched an average of 371 times per day), and #6 for “beekeeping forum” (worldwide).

Headstand Media will be redesigning, rebranding and rebuilding the site to increase search engine performance. We believe that we can make this site the #1 ranked site in Google and other search engines for “beekeeping” and some related search terms in 2008.

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