What is Virtually New Orleans?
Virtually New Orleans is Yatcom Communications main Internet production. It's hard to put VNO into a single classification because it both a guide for the visitor to the city as well as a lifestyle magazine of interest to anyone who likes New Orleans.
Virtually New Orleans has a great deal to offer the visitor to New Orleans. Our Lodging section provides the VNO reader with extensive listings on Hotels, Guest Houses, and Bed-and-Breakfasts. Our Virtual Dining Guide lights a path through the hundreds of restaurants in town to the best around town. Our Top Ten "Must-Do" Sightseeing list contains enough ideas to keep visitors busy for three or four days.
Where else on-line are you going to find a "Yat Lexicon?" How about a virtual tour of Metairie Cemetery? Where will you find Carnival information applauded by locals, tourists, and policemen? Only VNO, of course. Each month, at least one new feature appears in VNO that keeps even the most jaded web-surfers coming back.
Much of the information a tourist reads about New Orleans would lead one to believe that the city ends at Rampart St. Virtually New Orleans goes beyond the Quarter, into the neighborhoods that have kept this city together in good times and bad. Our entire organization is based on neighborhoods--Da Quarters, Gentilly, Mid-City, even Metairie and the West Bank.
That's why we have a Feature Photo page. It may be a breaking news story, or just something in town that we felt should be featured. All are quality shots that illustrate the city from Virtually New Orleans' unique point of view.
Virtually New Orleans is produced by Edward J. Branley. Ed started VNO in November, 1994, as an extension to his New Orleans Mailing List. Having developed several Frequently Asked Questions documents for the mailing list, Ed decided to make this information available via the Web, and VNO was born.
It's a diverse group. The core readers of VNO are twofold: Visitors who learn of VNO from Ed Branley's frequent postings to a wide number of USENET newsgroups and Internet mailing lists, as well as subscribers to the New Orleans Mailing List, many of whom consider VNO their "home page."
Hit counts are such a dubious thing. We read about some pretty exaggarated claims from many people who put up web pages. Virtually New Orleans doesn't need to make up numbers. Our raw hit count runs between 20,000 and 30,000 hits per day. That translates into an average of 2,000 unique sites per day accessing the VNO home page. Section pages such as Lodging and Restaurants average 500 unique sites per day, and special features such as Virtual Mardi Gras or Virtual Jazz Fest average 750 per day. By comparison, New Orleans CityBusiness, the city's business/economics weekly claims 15,000 subscribers, and New Orleans magazine has a circulation of 62,000 monthly. In other words, VNO is competitive with two of the major print publications in town that are over 20 years old each.