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Change, growth and marriage
If you are a regular reader of East Kootenay News Online Weekly (e-KNOW), you have by now noticed that our website has changed.
Change is an absolute necessity for new websites as technology moves so rapidly that it is paramount to keep abreast of advancements and take advantage of them.
When we launched e-KNOW on July 6, 2011, our website was essentially stitched together in an affordable manner (all we could afford) and soon we realized the error of our ways.
Readership grew at numbers we did not anticipate – admittedly a good problem – over the course of our first year in business providing news and information about the East Kootenay and its four key areas; Cranbrook, Columbia Valley, Elk Valley and Kimberley. This created a massive problem as increasing numbers of readers created a drag on site speed, threatening all sorts of digital doom.
Last year at this time we were celebrating more than 200,000 page views in our first year in business. It seemed an awesome number at the time.
As we celebrate our second anniversary, we are receiving about 200,000 page views a MONTH. That translates to thousands and thousands of readers and an incrementally-growing beehive of activity on the website and in our social media mediums (Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In). Our record thus far for most readers in a single day is 11,200 – from this past June 20, when flooding was starting to ravage the region. The volume of traffic crashed our site for eight minutes.
All that said, it became obvious that it was time to take e-KNOW to the next level.
Chris Botterill and Genex Marketing –the nuts and bolts and thingymajiggy fixers and heart rate restorers of e-KNOW – reassembled the website last year and have again embarked on an upgrade and renovation of the website.
Improvements are making the site faster and it is more compressed – with five key pages: home, Columbia Valley, Cranbrook, Elk Valley and Kimberley. Within each community section are sub categories, just like a newspaper, including news, views, arts and entertainment, business, travel/tourism and sports – all relevant to each community.
We apologize if you were comfortable with the old site, and believe me, as an old ink-stained wretch who must be cudgeled repeatedly by reality before accepting changes, I understand any annoyance felt.
We believe you will quickly navigate the site and understand its still relatively simple layout in no time.
Over the course of the next week or so we will be experiencing some bugs and glitches or “bad weirdness” as I call them – so please bear with us. Chris and team are working themselves to beer-craving fits and stupors, picking through code and banging the back end of e-KNOW with monkey wrenches and steel-toed boots and we wish to thank them for their efforts! There would be no e-KNOW without Chris Botterill/Genex.
We’ve yet to hold a second anniversary party and wish to convey to our regular contributing writers and photographers that we will be contacting you when we can get it together to have a celebration! We’ve been a bit preoccupied, which I am getting to.
In the meantime, we wish to deeply and loudly thank our amazing Writers’ Village members: Bob Ede, Chris Newel (Corporal and otherwise), Derryll White, Gerry Warner, Josh Lockhart, Kim Inglis, Larry Halverson, Lynne Martin, Mary Giuliano, Miranda Holmes, S/Sgt. Marko Shehovac (and Columbia Valley RCMP Detachment officers) and Stephanie Stevens for their incredible support and for helping making e-KNOW the widest-read newspaper in the region. As of this publishing, we have 8,830 subscribers (4,536 email newsletter and 4,290 social media. Facebook – 2,712; Twitter – 971; 611 – Linked-In) – all leading to the website and helping us generate about 200,000 page views per month.
Also, thanks to Krista Nebloch, Bob Ede, Bram Rossman, Chad St. Pierre, Chris Newel, Jim Webster, Larry Halverson, Mary Giuliano and Stephanie Stevens for their awesome photographic submissions.
We are also getting a growing buy-in to the concept of an online-only newspaper (the future folks) from all levels of government, but most especially from local governments. Our ‘views’ sections are enlivened by regular submissions from the likes of Kootenay East MLA Bill Bennett, Columbia River-Revelstoke MLA Norm Macdonald, City of Fernie Mayor Mary Giuliano and City of Cranbrook Mayor Wayne Stetski.
E-KNOW remains an open medium for all people – be they elected officials, concerned citizens, not-for-profit organizations, sports teams/clubs, creative writers, photographers and videographers and much more. Feel free to send submissions to: [email protected] . Please give at least one-week lead time in order to ensure your submission being published on time.
Thanks also to the ever-growing number of letter writers, sources providing tips and information and submitting groups and individuals. Folks are starting to understand that e-KNOW can spread their message to a larger-than-usual audience, which grows daily as more people become web-savvy.
Finally, we wish to humbly and gratefully thank all those who have or are currently advertising with e-KNOW. Advertisers are the ones who are the ones who make e-KNOW run. They allow us to provide the information and news that we do and as we grow, we will only provide more and more need-to-know information and entertainment – professionally and uncluttered by news and nonsense from outside our region.
Marriage
And now we have a pending important date to attend this Saturday. Carrie and I are getting married and will be unavailable until Tuesday, July 30.
While all the people mentioned above play important roles in this endeavour – none play a bigger one than Carrie. She is the glue and sense of the operation – no doubt about it.
Seeing as how I love her with the hyper-charged enormity of a celestial body going supernova, I am feeling like the luckiest son of a gun under the sun. Today also happens to be her birthday – so happy birthday my darling!
And now if you’ll excuse us we have family arriving from the baldies and a party to get started.
Love to all and thanks again for supporting e-KNOW.
Ian Cobb/e-KNOW and
Carrie Schafer/Through My Eyes Photography
