This past weekend some of the WeHuntSC.com team members + a friend of mine from Finland got together and went to see our 2009 Deer hunting competition winners.  This proved to be a long day as our winners were from Patrick, Columbia, & Aiken.  It was good to get out and meet some new people and see some of South Carolina.  A lot of times we are stuck behind computers so it was a good change of pace to get out and hear the winners? stories and get a different perspective. 

In case you didn?t know the story, WeHuntSC.com launched in September of 2009.  We weren?t exactly sure as to how the site would take among the hunting audience in SC.  We have been surprised at the growth of the site and energy surrounding it.  We are working hard on the back end to keep the site up and going and keep sponsorships coming in.   It?s fun to do and we are trying to keep it interesting as much as possible.

I wanted to communicate some of our web metrics to you all so that you can get a scope of the audience following the site & so that the competition winners know that there were more than 2 people looking at the site! Lol

Anyway, in the State of South Carolina we had 2,537 unique visitors from 70 cities
 

If you are curious as to which cities the dots represent or you want to know the frequency of visits per city, just DOWNLOAD THE STATE METRICS REPORT HERE

We also got some attention of states other than South Carolina.  To see which other states (40) that visited our site and the frequency with which they did, just DOWNLOAD THE NATION METRICS REPORT HERE

Overall we had over 37,000 page views from 3,995 visitors. 

So we are off the ground!  We?re going to keep pushing and marketing and hopefully the site will grow even more.  I?m going to update the site to a new, updated version of the site before too long.  I?m excited about it, but still have some finishing touches/updates to get configured.  Maintaining 2 sites at once is not an easy task!

Also, we announced the competition winners today!  Congratulations to Chad, Shannon, & Trent for winning our first annual competitions.  We?re going to deliver their prizes to them next weekend and shoot some video of the winners to include in a future blog.

Now back to the grind? thanks!


CBP
 

	See the article online here

By BO PETERSEN - The (Charleston) Post and Courier

In the Lowcountry, after God, country and family, there's deer.

Young and old spend the entire year primed for fall season to open. They scout stand sites, set up motion-detecting cameras, run the dogs and watch the ground for telltale hoofprints.

A freezer of venison makes a winter; a rack on the wall is a story to tell. Hundreds of acres of corn, oats and rye are planted, and bags of corn are dispersed to lure big bucks out of the bottoms.

But sometimes they just don't come. Three-quarters of a million deer are estimated to live in South Carolina. A quarter-million bucks and does were reported harvested last year.

This fall, hunters find themselves sitting over food plots alone.

"They're not seeing the deer," said Trey Hoffman of Palmetto Deer Processing in Moncks Corner.

"The deer just aren't coming out to the fields," said Kyle Jones, manager of Echaw Creek Plantation in Berkeley County.

"It's not that the deer aren't there. There's plenty of deer track. There's plenty of deer moving," said Jacob Casa, of Ravenwood Hunt Club in Ravenel.

What it is, is the acorn. Maybe the best nut crop in 10 years is raining out of the oaks into the bottoms. That's like Haagen-Dazs to the deer, said Michael Cordray of Cordray's Venison Processing in Ravenel. And when there's ice cream lying right at your hoof, you're not going to go looking for corn.

The summer rains that brought the acorns also brought honeysuckle, greenbriar and other browse, or gazing food, that deer prefer. All that and warm weather has deer staying in the bottoms to feast and lying low until the late-night chill. It's one of those natural cycles. The better years for growing deer food usually turn out to be better years for acorns.

Some hunters are bagging deer. On Friday morning, more than 30 harvests already had been brought into Cordray's processing plant a few hours after opening. Two club hunters who brought in five deer said 20 more were spotted.

But a lot of the success has been among hunters who take on the sludge into the deep woods to stake out an acorn-rich oak tree.

So the season's a bust? Not so fast. Hunters said deer were moving when the night turned cold Thursday. The cold is thought to get them moving.

"The frost will kill the browse and sour the acorns. I think the hunting will be a lot better," Jones said.

"It ought to be pretty positive for the rest of the season," Casa said. "The bottom line is, you're not going to be able to harvest any deer sitting in your house."
 

We recently held the video shoot for the video spokeswomen for our WeHuntSC.com.  The shoot was a neat experience and I think the footage will turn out well on the site.  Jason Fararooei of Yellow Cape Communications ran the show and he did a very professional job. 

The footage was shot in HD with a blue-screen background.  Normally this would have been shot with a green-screen background, but due to the hues of green in the camouflage shirts, we could not use the green-screen. 

The shoot took about 3 hours in total and we had 3 different females come in for the shoot.  When the footage posts to the site, you will see these three ?video-spokeswomen? on random site pages.  Mostly they will be giving short intro messages to the pages.  The video will be flash-based, transparent, waist-up shots.

Also, if you need some high quality video work, be it for the web , TV, or DVD?Yellow Cape Communications can do the job.  Check out what they?ve got going on at www.YellowCapeCommunications.com or contact Jason at [email protected]

Below are some visuals to give you an idea of what went on at the shoot.