We have just launched the Australia (www.dojos.com.au) and New Zealand (www.dojos.co.nz) specific Websites. They are intended to serve as the Dojo Directories for these two countries.

Both Websites feature location pages specific to States and Cities of their respective countries. Australia currently has about 1,800 Dojo, and New Zealand about 300 listed. Martial Arts Style charts are available for the States and Cities based on the styles offered by listed schools.

All features like Dojo Details, Map, Directions, Reviews etc. are available on both Websites. 

Dojo owners, instructors and associates are able to add and update Dojo information.

We are very excited to announce the launch of www.dojos.ca, a Dojo Directory dedicated to Martial Arts Schools in Canada. There are currently about 1,600 Dojo listed in Canada. dojos.ca offers advanced Dojo Search functionality similar to dojolocator.com and dojolocator.co.uk, but focuses on locations in Canada. It gives you an overview of Martial Arts in all Canadian provinces and cities.

You can look up Martial Arts Schools offering any specific style of your choice near any address in Canada.

An interesting feature of dojos.ca is the support for unicode/international characters. School owners may enter name, introduction or program details in languages other than English (French, for example). In addition, it understands the city names in english or their proper name, for example, you can search for Montreal, or Montréal.

You can also rate and review Dojos in Canada. Rating is based on Instruction quality and other aspects of a school.

School owners, Instructors or even students can maintain the listing of any Dojo on dojos.ca.

As always, it is free to list a Dojo with dojos.ca

We are very excited to introduce dojolocator.co.uk - a Dojo Directory Featuring Dojos and Martial Arts Styles in UK.

The Website has been launched after many long nights and weekends of hard work by the dojo locator team!

dojolocator.co.uk initially features about 1,200 Dojo in the United Kingdom. You can look-up Dojo near you by providing a complete address, or view Martial Arts Schools and Styles in any given city by searching with a City Name.

Similar to dojolocator.com, dojolocator.co.uk show Style Statistics, Interactive Map, Dojo Ratings and Reviews and includes a rating widget that school's may display on their Website.

Soon there will be overview of Martial Arts Schools and Styles in all UK Counties, as well as Post codes.

dojolocator.co.uk is aimed to offer a valuable service to UK's Martial Arts Community, as dojolocator.com has done for USA for the past 7 Years!

dojolocator.com is currently attracting 100,000+ unique visitors per month.

If you are associated with a Martial Arts School in the UK, please make sure that it is listed with dojolocator.co.uk and the information is up-to-date.

In January 2010, dojolocator.com had about 6,800 unique visitors. In January 2011, dojolocator.com had about 67,800 unique visitors. That is a 987% increase in traffic over 12 months! 

In February 2011, we have seen over 73,000 unique visitors, which is another 13.6% higher than the previous month. Better yet, March 2011 is projected to have over 100,000 unique visitors.

dojolocator.com is rapidly growing. It is growing faster than our anticipation. Here is the chart showing unique visitors over this period:

Here is a quick summary of the year 2010:

• New Dojo Listings: 1,082
• Dojo Updates: 1,806
• Email Leads Generated: 2,212
• Average daily visits: 2,229
• Average daily page views: 10,245

Early 2011, we started tracking additional user activity on dojolocator.com, these include detailed Dojo activity (Detail views, Map views, Direction Lookups etc.), Search activity by location (Zip, City, County, State etc.). Eventually this will allow us to rank locations based on search activity.

Why such a rapid Growth?

dojolocator.com is a work of passion. We give everything to make it not only the most useful Website to the Martial Arts community, but also the most Search Engine optimized Website possible. Dojolocator.com features pages for each City, County, Zip Code and State in the USA. Google index currently has over half a million pages from dojolocator.com and a large number of our visitors come from the search engines.

Try searching for Dojo Finder, Dojo Search, Find Martial Arts or Dojo Directory in google, you will see what we mean.

If you are listed with dojolocator.com, we would like to thank you for being a part of Internet's top Dojo Finder. If your school is not listed yet, please take a minute to List it with dojo locator.

If you ever come across a school that is not listed here, please encourage them to list it. Listing is still free!

We often heard from users that certain school has moved, or has gone out of business. Now you can report these issues right from the school's detail page.

There is a new option available on each school's page, called 'Report Incorrect Data'.

You can use this option to report if a School has moved, closed down, or if certain information on the page is incorrect. You can also report if a listing is a duplicate of another listing:

When you report an issue, it will be first reviewed and verified by one of our Editors before making effective.

If you know that some schools in your neighborhood has closed down or moved, please report it and help us improve the quality of dojolocator.com's data.

This will provide a better experience to those looking for Martial Arts Schools in your area.

DojoLocator.com has been completely revamped to fit larger screen reosolutions typically in use today.

This required redesigning most of the sections to fit the wider page layout. In particular, the Dojo detail pages have been completely modified. We feel that this is the best way to utilize the screen real-estate. In addition, the pages can be shared on Facebook or posted to Twitter more easily.

The home page now shows a combined list of New Dojo listings and Dojo Updates.

We are very excited to announce the addition of Style based Dojo Search on dojolocator.com.

Now you are able to select up to 5 Martial Arts Styles when searching any location. DojoLocator will display all schools offering any of the Styles you select. If there is no school offering any of the selected styles, DojoLocator will go on to search up to 150 Miles to find schools that offer your selected styles.

This is an early stage of the Style search feature. As we study the usability and other aspects of it, we will continue to improve it.

When there is no Dojo found in your selected location, DojoLoctor initially hides the Map. You can see the location of any School in the list by clicking the 'Locate on Map' link next to any Dojo Listing.

Try Style Based Dojo Search.

If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let us know.

*** This issue is now Fixed! ***

Earlier this month Twitter has made significant changes to its API. As a result, automatic updates from dojolocator.com are not being posted on Twitter at the moment. If you have subscribed to our Twitter feed (@dojolocator), you should know that there has been over a dozen new Dojo listed with dojolocator.com since the last Twitter post.

We are actively working to fix this issue.

Until now, DojoLocator.com has been using a Mail server that served about 1000 domains, with as much as 3000 Email accounts.

In a shared hosting environment, Email Servers have many challenges to deal with. If one user's PC, Email account or Website is compromised, the Email server may be abused by Spammers and thousands of SPAM might be sent out the the server before anyone notices.

In these situations, the Mail server may get black listed or blocked by the major ISPs, which prevents delivery of legitimate Emails from all other users using the same Email server.

Each day, visitors of dojolocator.com send information requests to many Dojo. These leads are forwarded to the Email address listed with these Dojo, and if these Emails are not properly delivered to the Dojo owners, it is a loss of opportunity. It is also a failure of dojolocator.com to provide answer to a customer query.

Therefore we have setup a new Email server for dojolocator.com, which will only process Emails for dojolocator.com and will not be affected by the activity of thousands of other accounts. Yet another step to make dojolocator.com useful/valuable to the Martial Arts Community.

If your Dojo is listed with dojolocator.com, please make sure the Email address is current and correct. Otherwise you might be missing out valuable leads.

In the recent months, many new features have been added to Dojo Locator. As a result, dojolocator.com has been gaining better search engine ranking and everyday more visitors come and search for dojos on dojolocator.com. More leads are being generated through the site everyday.

Here is a chart showing daily visitors from the beginning of this year (2010):

As of May 18th, about 300 new Dojo have signed up. Several Dojo updates occur everyday.

We are currently working on Dojo Search based on styles, a feature often requested by our users. This will further ehnance dojolocator.com as a Dojo Search tool.

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions and encouragements.