THUNDER BAY – The switchover to the new server for NetNewsledger.com is complete. Over the past several weeks, as the upgrade to the new server has taken place, and the speed of the website has increased, already there are two things notable in our webstats. First traffic has increased, and second, returning daily visits are up. The task of moving has been a little longer than we first thought it would be, but that has been outweighed by the new features that are on the new server.
Some of the features include a more secure and faster means of running the WordPress source code. Protecting the website from threats also means a safer experience for you, our readers. Several of our readers have also helped too. Thanks to Derek for the new political breaking news banners for the Federal Election. Special thanks to Lily for helping with some of the WordPress transfer. This move has been one of the more interesting in our five year history.
During the transfer period, NetNewsledger.com also clicked over the 1,300,000 visitor mark. That is the number of actual people who have been on NNL over the past three years.
We had some interesting information shared with us by one of our readers over the past several days, Darren Foulds produced a really interesting video on Sunday’s hail storm. We incorporated that video into our story. Darren commented on his blog, “The local news websites were almost as effective as Facegroup, and I’m impressed that Net News Ledger has sent more than 70 views my way so far…Here’s a breakdown of views. It totals 92%, there were lots of other <1% numbers I’m not including; 18% Facegroup, 10% NetNewsLedger.com, 5% CBC, and 8% YouTube.”
The aspect of the Social Media growth in Thunder Bay is one of the Internet waves that seem to favour speedy and updateable online news.
Back to the changes coming, our comments section is in the process of undergoing some changes as well, there are a few neat tools that we are going to be adding to the site to make it more fun to post comments. As they say, stay tuned.
Our goals across NetNewsledger.com, TheSleepingGiant.ca and later this summer on ThunderBayRadio.ca are to offer you a more interactive, and interesting means of gathering information, sharing via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. We are working toward offering some interesting alternatives to you.
Thunder Bay, and in fact all of Northwestern Ontario are increasingly connected to the Internet as their source for entertainment, news, information and opinion, the growth of NNL over the past five years is a demonstration of that interest.
What is interesting however is how, over the course of a day, website visits on netnewsledger.com shift. First thing in the morning, our Internet visitors include people from across the globe, including regular readers from Europe, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and China. One of our readers shared that her son now living in China is now a reader. “I sent him your site and China actually allows it to be seen and read. Now he can keep up with what is going on in the area so he says thank you”.
By noon most of our readers are starting to come from across Ontario and Canada. Through the day, the greatest number of our readers are from Thunder Bay and across Northwestern Ontario. Over recent weeks, and one of the reasons that NNL moved to a faster server, was due to a growing number of readers coming in from across communities in Ontario’s far north. Some of those communities do not have super fast Internet yet, and some of our readers commented that the site wasn’t as fast as it could be for them.
The switch has not been as smooth as we thought it would, but has been done with minimal interuption of service to you, and that has been one of the goals.
Over the coming weeks watch for updates on some of the new features we are working on.
As always, we are here because of you. Miigwech, and thank you.
James Murray