Okay, we've enlisted Britney Spears for a catchy headline but in all seriousness, QLocal's Roger Blaxall has discovered the hit rates of the much vaunted website 'Discover ormskirk'

This from Borough counucil PR officer Michael Byrne: 'Discover Ormskirk is a great new website launched in July 2017 to help local people and visitors find out more about Ormskirk and the surrounding West Lancashire area.

'The Ormskirk Town Centre Management Group set up the website to help tackle a key challenge identified in the town centre strategy, which was the lack of a comprehensive website to promote Ormskirk.

'The new site acts as a showcase for the town, promoting shops, bars and restaurants as well as events and activities taking place in the town centre and places nearby.

And https://discoverormskirk.com/ is becoming increasingly popular. Visitor numbers are steadily increasing month on month and there were just under 800 unique users in October. More and more events are being submitted by organisers for posting on the website. After the home page the most popular pages for visitors to go to are events, the gallery of event images, the market, Ormskirk town centre and the page for independent businesses.

'People can find everything they need to have a great day and night in the area, so anyone who wants to know about wonderful places to visit, shop, eat and drink should take a look at https://discoverormskirk.com/.

'Further work will be carried out by the Town Centre Management Group in the near future to encourage more local businesses, organisations and visitors, to use the website.

'If any businesses or organisations want to know more about https://discoverormskirk.com/ they can contact hello@discoverormskirk.com.

'Based on latest visitor numbers (which in the last 28 days amounts to 900 unique users) the Discover Ormskirk website costs just over 9 pence per month per visitor.

The website was built by West Lancashire Borough Council staff and is looked after in-house. It cost less than £1,000 pounds to set up and costs less than £1,000 per year to run.

Phew! Just 900 hits a month - if we understand the PR correctly; interpreting web stats. in a black art in itself ... suffice to say that yesterday QLocal Ormskirk had over 1200 readers for the stories posted by Blaxall.

And there's more - QLocal's also discovered the unbelievable cost of branding, etc. for Ormskirk - watch this space; and if you wondered why the town's popular Friday night time monthly markets stopped all of a sudden we've got the inside line on that, too.