Community website backs positive ‘Paisley is…’ campaign

Dec 17 2009 by Alison Rennie, Paisley Daily Express
IT’S only a few days old but already the ‘Paisley is…’ campaign has got the whole town talking.
Every Buddies favourite daily is leading the way in backing the bid to boost our town.
We helped launch the campaign and want to make sure all our readers know all about the positive events and good people living in our historic town.
And we’ve been inundated with responses from folk wanting to come on board and do their bit to promote Paisley.
Now Brian McGuire, who runs the popular Paisley.org website from his home in Glenburn, wants to spread the postive Paisley message all over the world.
Brian set up his excellent website nine years ago and it has grown to become massively popular across the world, receiving an incredible 1.38 million hits last month.
He explained: “I got it going to promote Paisley. I had just left the army and come home to Paisley and after touring the world, I realised Paisley isn’t as bad as everyone makes out.
“At the time, the town was going through the drug wars, as they were called, which gave it a bad reputation but it really wasn’t that bad compared to some places I’d seen.
“I started putting up pictures of Paisley and a bit of history on a website and it grew from there.”
Brian is right behind the ‘Paisley is…’ campaign and already has the logos on his website. The logo cleverly uses the ‘is’ in Paisley to promote certain aspects of the town such as its history or popular events.
Brian said: “The logo is on every page of the website and when you click on a different page, the logo changes to something relevant to the page.
“So if you’re looking at the history of Paisley, the logo would change to ‘Paisley is…rich in culture’.
“It’s quite clever and can be used to promote lots of different parts of the town.
“I’m right behind the Paisley Daily Express and Paisley Vision Board for doing this.”
The Paisley.org website reaches across the world and is manned by Brian and 10 volunteers.
Around half of all the website visitors come from America and the rest from across the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
Brian added: “We never have any problems with people on the site, it’s always very positive.
“It’s a community website. I have been asked to make money out of it by doing different things but I’ve always said no.
“It’s for the people of Paisley and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

We want to know all about what ‘Paisley is…’ doing so if you’ve got a good news story about the town or its people that you want to share, phone our newsroom on 0141 887 7911 or drop us an e-mail at pde@s-un.co.uk

click here for the Paisley Daily Express website