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Steel Valley Outdoors Second Anniversary!

By Lou Yuhasz on March 27th, 2009

Happy Birthday, Mom!
Image by ginnerobot via Flickr

Happy Birthday  Yet Again!

Well, We’ve made it through our second year, and Steel Valley Outdoors is still standing.

Two years ago, I was listening to the complainers on WKBN on the way home from work.It was a wet, cold March day, and the conversation was basically about how horrible our area was and how we couldn’t compete or attract business for a lot of reasons, including the climate.

I started thinking about whether this was true. I mean, Seattle had a major industry collapse and pull out, and it isn’t known for the great weather. They Seem to be competing just fine…

So I bought a package from 1and1, even though I had no clue what I was doing. The first site was a static template, and it blew. Then I started piecing it together, first discovering WordPress, then better, more professional templates. I was hacked a couple of times and learned how to protect myself, learned a little PHP, SQL, CSS, SEO and a bunch of other Acronyms.

Today, Steel Valley Outdoors has over 60 visitors and about 100 page views daily, with hits from Social Bookmarking sites causing spikes of up to 1,000 visitors. On any given month, I get visitors from nearly every state, and have regular readers in Europe and Australia. We maintain between 40 and 50 RSS Subscribers. I am nearing 400 posts, and comments and pingbacks are going up each month.

As we head into the spring mud season and prepare for outdoor activities, now’s a good time to re-explore Steel Valley Outdoors and discover new features that I’ve recently added to the site:

  • Widgets- We’ve got Skiing reports, Fishing news, Kayaking fundamentals, Hunting Videos and more on Steel Valley outdoors. We’re not just a collection of links and news reports anymore.

  • Our Stores-Our Bookstore is powered by Amazon and contains many Ohio Field guides and travel books. Our storefront is still a work in progress but allows you to find Outdoor Equipment deals from our partners like Altrec, Bass Pro Shops, Eastern Mountain Sports and More.

  • Links- When I started, our region did not have as strong a presence on the web as it does now. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve added trails to the Hiking and Biking Pages, Mahoning and Trumbull county Golf Courses have added web sites. Our 100 parks in 100 miles now has over 120 entries, and more are discovered all the time.

  • Comments- Comments are now Gravatar enabled, and should be threaded soon. WordPress offers instant Pingbacks so anytime you link to post here, I generate a link back to your website, giving you an instant SEO Boost. Forums are online, but I can’t get anyone to start a conversation. Nows the time to ask questions and leave comments.

  • Sharing- With Google Feedburner, Local Outdoor news from Steel Valley Outdoors is delivered right to your inbox or home page. Or get our feed in a desktop widget for your sidebar, or post it on your blog. Also, under each post is a collection of links to your favorite Social Networking sites.

What’s ahead for the site? glad you asked:

  • More Original Content- Unfortunately, I’ve had a few health issues in the last year. I’ve come to rely on the ODNR news releases, but that’s about over. I Intend to start local interviews again, the Popular Essential Gear Series, and a regular schedule of syndicated content.

  • More Community Involvement – From Local blogs to volunteer organizations, now’s the time to promote your own organization and activities. If you would like to be featured on Steel Valley outdoors, Drop me a line.

  • More Regions- Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh and Erie all give me as much traffic as the tri-county area. So I’ll be expanding coverage to include these regions too.

  • General Decruftification- An Ongoing battle. Bad links, Old pages, Too Many Banners….Told you I wasn’t a designer.

Please take a minute to look around, and feel free to leave a comment. What would you like to see in the coming year?

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