Announcing…The new blog!

You don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to this. Soon to be skiing, and back to blogging about it…with a much-improved blog!

Did anyone notice the changes in the blog? After all the time I spent over the summer on the re-design, I sure hope you noticed 🙂 . I kept the header photo of the skiers on Elk Pass as I thought that might be the only thing you’d recognize. Remember how narrow the old blog was? This one stretches across most of your monitor screen.

This blog took a quantum leap in readership last winter, and now we’re taking the design to a whole new level. A few times during the re-design over the summer I hit roadblocks, but was given timely advice by Tony Daffern of the Kananaskis Trails blog which enabled me to keep going, so a big shout-out to Tony for his help.

For someone who knew nothing about Website Hosts, Themes, FTP clients, Plugins, and Feedburners, I am extremely pleased with the results. A few times the entire thing simply disappeared into a black hole, but with perseverence and some colourful language, eventually solved the problem and brought it back to life.

What I am most relieved about is the fact that I was able to import almost everything from the old site including most of the photos. We have three years of data for people to access when looking for specific trails or subjects. On the sidebar you will see the Categories and Archives headings. Just click on them to open up a world of interesting ski reports, stories, and comments.

I had no idea in Nov 2008 when I made my first post if anyone would ever read what I was writing. My goal was to assist a few skiers in finding the best snow. Since I was out skiing so often, I thought it might be a good idea to let everyone know the conditions. I knew from first-hand experience how frustrating it could be to drive all the way from Calgary and not find suitable snow on which to ski.

During that first winter, I was ecstatic when we reached 100 views on any given day.  Fast forward to last winter, we routinely had 600 views per day, and reached a peak of 1259 on Feb 7.

Think we can beat that this year?

I’ve been cajoled into joining Facebook and Twitter, so make it worth my while and click on Like on the sidebar under Find us on Facebook. It will give me a thrill every time I see a new icon.

The Clustrmap is kind of neat. It shows the locations where readers are coming from, and it turns out they’re from all around the world.

To help with the costs of running this site, I’m now accepting advertising on here. We already have sponsors for some fantastic contests where you can win a pair of skis, or two nights at a beautiful lodge in Banff. Watch for more details on those. As always, your comments are welcome and appreciated.

 

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