One Year Today

It’s official, it’s one full year since the website was created! So it seems relevant to cover some of what’s happened in the first twelve months.

The website was inaugurated on the 25th May 2011. At the time, the general purpose and direction of the website weren’t clear, only the subject matter. The website looked very different too, using the oldest default theme and being somewhat unreadable and uninteresting as a consequence.

The first discussion posts were written quickly, and in the first few days the website was indexed by numerous search engines and started appearing in only a few tens of results per day, which was effectively nothing. But gradually over the first few months, more and more articles were written, and more authors joined in writing too. Consequently, the search listing hits rose continually, and appreciably numbers of visitors were coming to the website.

Today the website is doing comfortably well. We can definitively say that we now get over one thousand unique visitors a month, which is a good result after one year. We still aim to grow more, and this leads me to return to the earlier point. When the website started it didn’t have much purpose; it was still trying different options to see which was most favourable. Now however, we’re in a decent position to produce a mission statement for the website, and here it is:

Mission Statement

The only requirement for someone to call themselves atheist is that they do not believe in the existence of one or more supernatural beings who observe or influence the events on planet earth. However, even this basic statement may be considered false or unnecessary, and contended by atheists with different definitions of gods. This contention is exemplary of one distinguishing quality of atheists: they tend to disagree with each other. This tendency to contradict and consider otherwise is good, since it shows independence of thought. This website intends to propagate this diversity of opinion. This website expects people to disagree, and wants them to voice their deliberations. This website permits multiple authors to submit discussion posts and essays, for the benefit of other people, and for the multiplicity of opinion.