Red Sails Festival a fantastic week

Superb weather and a successful programme of events for all ages meant this year’s Red Sails Festival drew large crowds to Portstewart - giving a great buzz and wonderful family atmosphere to the town.

Many traders experienced an unprecedented boost to business during the week particularly on the Saturday of the fireworks.

Constable Tracey Russell from North Coast PSNI said: “Police would like to commend the organisers of the Red Sails event in Portstewart as well as the many thousands of people who attended the hugely successful event”.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

 “North Coast police were out and about across the week of the festival and made use of a mobile police station in the area. The event was a superb tourist draw and police engaged with locals and visitors alike to discuss crime prevention issues, give out wristbands to kids and deal with a few traffic issues that materialised. Generally though, the event happened without major incident.”

In July 2012 the Red Sails website attracted just over 30,000 hits. However with the aid of local website development company, URL Results, by the midweek of the festival the site had received just over half a million hits for the month of July.

On the Friday of the festival URLResults, in conjunction with Wired-Up Security Solutions and Shenanigans, provided a live web video stream, which provides a spectacular view of the promenade and the wonderful scenery beyond.

By lunchtime Saturday the webcam had attracted over 27,000 views.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Patrick Logue, Development Director at URL Results said, “We are delighted to facilitate an important local event through a brand new website and help to promote Portstewart to the wider world. We saw a large spike in traffic to the website around the event thanks in part to our in-house SEO platform and we plan to continue to work with the Red Sails Festival in the future.”

For contributing to a fantastic week The Portstewart Community Association would like to thank The Big Lottery, Coleraine Borough Council, D.CA.L., Causeway Volunteer Centre, Coleraine Community Rescue Service, H.M. Coastguard, CSWAN, the Public Health Agency our local Fire Service, the National Trust, URL Results, Wired-Up Security, our local Churches, Melvin Yanes, our local press, all the acts, groups, organisations, businesses and individuals who have contributed to events or festival costs.
A special thanks to the P.S.N.I. and in particular to our local neighbourhood police team of Tracey Russell, Phil Graham and James Mullan, who did a fantastic job supporting us and interacting with the community during the week.

Roll on 2014!

Related topics: