If you've noticed that I haven't been blogging as much and my activity with the site has been a little slower lately... it's because I've been doing a lot of updating behind the scenes that will hopefully serve everyone better in the long run.  As you can probably tell, I've updated the site. I wanted to post a quick update to key you in to some of the new features. The site now has:

• Enhanced profile
• A wall where users can post updates
• An internal messaging system
• The ability to friend/follow other users (there will be more updates to the friend section soon)
• A member directory
• Social Groups (you can create a group for any reason/purpose)
• Updated message board (making it easier to add hyperlinks now)
• And a new site design

I hope that you will enjoy these new updates and I hope they make it easier for everyone to communicate. I'm going to continue to update the site with enhancements in the weeks/months to come. This update has taken me a lot of time and because of that the competitions have suffered a little, but I'm about to get on them here shortly as well. If something is a little off or doesn't seem right to you, please send me an email so that I can look into your issues as they arise.

I tried to clean up the design of the site and make it less "busy" so that it's easier to focus on collaboration and information exchange. As part of the update we lost a few message board posts, comments, etc.  If one of your posts was lost I apologize and ask you to re-post.

Thanks again for your patience as I continue to work to serve SC outdoors better! Look for some more really great stuff coming in the future. We're not done yet.

Regards,

Clint

If you read these blogs then you know that we frequently monitor the site traffic to see what is going on with the metrics and to monitor our growth.  We try to give periodic reports of site metrics to let readers and site visitors see who else is checking things out in South Carolina.

Turkey season did show growth in hits and we?re happy about that.  From April 1 ? April 30th, in South Carolina, we had 987 visits from 60 different cities.  The image below will give you a feel for the spread of hits that we received from South Carolinians.

See the detailed South Carolina report here.

On a national level we received 1,480 visits via 33 states, which is pretty good for just one month.  It seems that others around the country are interested in what?s going on with the hunters of South Carolina!

The image below will give you a feel for the spread of hits we received from the national audience.

See the detailed national report here.

I also looked at the metrics from when we started back last September until now and we?ve had 10,395 visits and 77,568 page views with users spending an average of 6:53 seconds on the site.  I?d say that?s a pretty good start for not even being up a year yet.  So thanks to everyone who visits the site and contributes videos, photos, forum posts, blog responses, competition submissions, etc.  The more traffic we receive, the better the competition prizes will be in the future.

And we keep pushing.

Regards,

Clint