Matt and Carolyn Smith began producing Internet "TownCenter" Websites in March 1995. Over the next several months the focus of their company began to shift as they started to provide Internet business strategy consulting and site design services to some well known organizations including Coulter Corporation, Cunard Cruise Lines, Lincoln Financial Group, et al. Some five years later, the website design and consulting business was sold to a publicly traded company.
In April 2002 the Smiths founded HTL, Inc. in order to return to their original idea of using the Web to provide extremely localized information. The new HomeTownLocator® Gazetteer that they soon developed was well received - especially by the academic community and librarians. The site was selected as the "Feature of the Month" by the New York State Library and it also received a favorable review by The Internet Scout Project at the University of Wisconsin.
The HomeTownLocator site is well referenced. Excluding our own internal links, as of July 15th, 2008, there were:
On July 15th, 2008, Quantcast.com ranked HomeTownLocator as 954 out of the 20 million Websites that they track. On the same date, Compete.com ranked the site as number 1,810 our of the top one million websites that they monitor. These rankings place HomeTownLocator.com in the top 0.2% of all U.S. Websites based on the number of people the domain attracts each month.
With the launch of the State Gazetteers, the original US Gazetteer, (http://www.HomeTownLocator.com), now acts as an access point to the State Gazetteers. In aggregate, the State Gazetteers have 4 times the content that our first gazetteer had.
HTL, Inc. has also created weather site which provides Local Weather - almost anywhere! - Find current and forecast weather conditions for local, national and international locations including 4,300 airports in 200 countries. Info includes local times for sunrise and sunset.