by Mike Carey, January 03, 2011
The Year in Review, 2010
Another year come and gone!
It’s been a fun year here at the web site with not a lot of huge changes, just steady growth and friendships shared.
This year we watched our Registered Members on the site grow from around 8,600 to 14,201. Our Premium Members grew as well, surpassing 400. We’d love to see that number grow more as the Premium Members have some nice additional features that regular members are missing out on. So do consider a membership. I think you’ll be pleased by what you get.
Readership was also strong as we had our first ever month where we had over 50,000 unique users visit the site. It showed in new reports posted as we again had over 5,000 reports posted to the site. I’m particularly pleased that the river anglers have been posting more and more reports, making the site even more of a year-round destination.
This year also saw more HD videos posted to the site than ever before. Our total views of videos are over 87,000! The HD format is just way cool and we’ll continue to post a steady stream of videos. We got a few from members, and hope to get more in 2011.
The annual picnic this year was held at Lake Tapps and a good time was had by all. Fortunately there was no “drama” this year. I’d like to thank Big Bass Dez and Fishinislife for their invaluable help, as well as all those that came early and helped to set up, and those that stayed and helped to clean up. And a special thanks to Dave and his friends for providing extra “support”. You guys rock!
Looking ahead to 2011, we have a BIG contest going on at the Puyallup Show this year and it’s just for the members of WashingtonLakes.com. Our sponsors have donated over $500 in great gear which we’ll be giving away. So be sure to print out those coupons - one to get in and one to enter the contest. And as always I’ll have some freebies for the general public. So please stop by and say “hi”.
Our “Next Big Thing” is a work in progress – the next web site upgrade. We’ll have some cool site additions and fun stuff for everyone. I doubt this will come out until 2012, but if you have ideas of new features you want to see please send them to us at support@washingtonlakes.com.
As always, the list is too long and we’re sure to miss some people. Aaron and I would like to thank our Moderators for keeping the Forum the BEST place to talk fishing without the garbage and trash talk so common on other sites. It’s a testament to the readers of WL.com that it is a rare thing to actually have to ban a member. We owe a big “Thank You” to all the members of WL.com. Thanks also to all our fishing report posters. We know that every month thousands of readers visit the site to get the latest fishing reports, but only hundreds of the members actually post reports. Our hats go off to the report posters. They share great information on fishing in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon and provide the most valuable aspect of WL.com. Thanks go to our guides and members that provide extra content in the form of articles and videos. The site has such a wealth of information that it gets harder to keep track of it all – be sure to use that “search” function!
So here’s to a great 2010 and looking forward to a wonderful 2011. Thank you all for being a part of WashingtonLakes.com!