That's right! New and improved. You see, we are experience growing pains: lots and lots of people are sending us stories and story ideas; lots of businesses are advertising and more are in the pipeline; lots of people are joining us each new day as a first-time viewer. Lots of them.
We now average 350 "unique" viewers on our lowest view day of the week - Sunday! That's our low count. Over the past 30 days we experienced over 4,000 unique viewers!
Now the problems: There's no book that tells us how to expand. We simply experiment, view other web sites for ideas and try things. Some things work; some things flop. We've had an experiment site testing some of these ideas for the past month, and finally decided, let's go live with it.
It's important to thank Ryan Lowry, our tech guy for all of these changes. He makes the impossible look easy.
Some important words about advertising. We believe our new home page will enhance our advertising options. All our right column advertisers continue to rotate, but we will show only a handful at a time. Each time you refresh the screen the advertisements will change. This allows us to highlight our advertisers better. That's important because they pay the freight.
Once you move off the home page... and our research shows us that the vast majority of you check 3 pages each time you log on...you will see every advertiser on the right column.
Our new look also enhances our display ad capabilities. You'll notice a display ad on the top right column. In the past six weeks we've been bombarded with display ad requests. Now we can satisfy that demand. These rotate also.
Garage sales. Say no more. We print them free and more and more viewers are sending them. We've created an easy way for you to review the garage sales and all our classified ads, which take an important spot on our home page.
Videos. That's right. Stay tuned. We'll soon show you parades, interviews, Oscar painting the mural, sports action, you name it. We may even record a council meeting!
We continue to tinker with the home page and with other enhancements. There are glitches. We are working on them.
Our intention remains unchanged: We want to provide Bluffton with the best up-to-the-minutes news, features, photos, advertising and everything else that moves in our town.
As always, your comments, words of encouragement and ideas are encouraged.
Mary and Fred Steiner
