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The Abilene Reporter-News was the third newspaper in the state of Texas to have presence on the Worldwide Web, debuting modestly in February of 1995 with a dozen or so pages under the banner "Reporter OnLine."
In the beginning, Reporter OnLine received a couple of hundred hits a week. We soon moved our site to a larger server and acquired the domain name texnews.com. Gradually we began adding more content and more timely updates, interactivity and the most complete Dallas Cowboys site on the Internet
As of January 1999, texnews.com was receiving about a MILLION page views a month, and that number continues to grow. That's over 200,000 page views a week. We have thousands of pages of content that are keyword searchable, and we add scores more more each day.
Although the Dallas Cowboys directory garners about 50 percent of the traffic, the rest of texnews.com enjoys continuing growth as a result.
Judging by the traffic in our numerous chatrooms and the two dozen or so e-mail messages we receive almost each day commenting on our site, the demographics of our site must follow fairly closely the ever-changing demographics of the Web. More and more women are visiting us, and even though more men may visit our Dallas Cowboys directory, we're sure that all ages of both sexes visit us regularly.
We have been used on more than one occasion by universities as a reference site, and considering the variety of educational domains that register on our server logs, a large segment of college students frequent us for one reason or another.
We presently have more than a dozen local advertisers on our site and have recently started regular banner campaigns for national advertisers ... some needing 100,000 impressions from us a month (meaning their ad banner will be seen 100,000 different times during a 30-day period).
We do not put all the content in the printed newspaper online, but we include most of the local news and information, plus hundreds of different stories on Texas news and sports each week. We want people from all over the world to know that they can come to our site for Abilene and area news and information, and to find out what's happening in Texas.
We've already added even more content in 1998 and will again in 1999 ... mainly features, entertainment, parenting, personal finance, home and garden and others. We are never content with our look or satisfied with the amount of information we provide. We want to enhance both for our Internet users and for our local, regional and national advertisers who want to reach a large audience.
We want to become THE Texas site on the Internet. We feel we're getting close to that ambitious goal.
Back to TEXNEWS.COM
