MulletFestival.com, the Original Online Guide to the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival, is celebrating 20 years of providing our community with everything to know about the annual festival. Launched in September 1997, MulletFestival.com is one of Niceville’s earliest Websites. In fact, at the time MulletFestival.com was being developed, there were only around 100,000 Websites worldwide.
NICEVILLE, Fla — MulletFestival.com, the Original Online Guide to the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival, is celebrating 20 years of providing our community with everything to know about the annual festival.
Launched in September 1997, MulletFestival.com is one of Niceville’s earliest Websites. In fact, at the time MulletFestival.com was first developed, there were only around 100,000 Websites worldwide.
“It was an exciting time; something new and different,” said Dennis Gilson, founder, and publisher of MulletFestival.com. “The Internet was just beginning to gain momentum back then.”
MulletFestival.com is an independent venture and is not affiliated with the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival Committee, though they work closely together.
Gilson, a veteran newspaper reporter and radio newscaster, said the Internet quickly captured his attention because he saw it as a new frontier for reaching people hungry for unfiltered news and information.
To put things in perspective, in 1997 most homes did not have a personal computer. Google did not exist. Most people who had a PC used a dial-up Internet connection with speeds ranging from 28.8Kbps to 33.6Kbps.
There were no smartphones in 1997. Today, mobile devices make up more than 70 percent of the traffic at MulletFestival.com.
The traffic the first year at MulletFestival.com was only in the 100s; today the site draws more than 100,000 readers annually. A great deal of the traffic comes in the days leading up to the Festival, and over the Festival weekend; however, the site stays busy year-round.
“People come to the site to reminisce, recall past festivals and performers, and to find a recipe for cooking up fresh mullet,” said Gilson.
Surprisingly, one of the most viewed pages at MulletFestival.com is the recipe for smoked mullet. Other popular mullet recipes at the site are for fried, grilled and baked mullet. MulletFestival.com features 18 mullet and mullet-related recipes, many of which were contributed many years back by area pioneers and old-timers, including one for Mullet Chowder.
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