Since the beginning of the school year, our staff has tried to advertise our website as best as we could. We established social media for the site by creating a Twitter and Facebook fan page to help us connect with our readers. We filled the school with posters prompting students to Tweet at us, and a few weeks ago we handed out over 2,000 flyers at the home football game against Bonner Springs High School to try to gain readership. After weeks of this advertising, the numbers on Google analytics still remained at a stagnant 150 views of the website per day even after that night the entire staff handed out flyers (and it was raining, mind you). By some miracle the statistics on Wednesday, Sept. 28 were different for the site. The site was viewed 344 times, a single day record for us.

Sarah speaking:

I’m not exactly sure what could have prompted the unexpected increase in page views. The other day, yearbook editor-in-chief Rachel Mills and I taped about 100 flyers around the school asking “Have you liked us on Facebook yet?” We thought we were clever for placing the flyers in unexpected places, including taping a flyer on the eye of the jaguar in the senior café and placing several posters like ornaments on one of the fake trees next to the cafeteria lunch line. We made trails of the posters leading to select teacher’s rooms and spelled out MV on one of the locker banks. But really, I didn’t expect our silliness to have any dramatic effect on website views. Maybe the increased views resulted from an increase of tweets lately from our staff? Maybe word was finally spreading about the content of the site around the school? I think that general reception to the site can best be summed up in a conversation I overheard in the hallway the day we put posters around the school.

Girl One: “Yeah, they [the JagWire] does online stuff now,” Girl One said.

Girl Two: “They’re annoying,” Girl Two said as she scowls at said newspaper poster.

Girl One: “I love our newspaper,” Girl One said.

I hope that this increase in website views is a sign that more Girl One types will be filling the hallways as the year progresses. But maybe Girl Two has a point, taping a poster coming out of a tampon dispenser was maybe a little much…

Jill speaking:

I am so excited that our site views have gone up in the last couple of days.  It’s awesome to know that the hard work and effort that our staff has put into the website is being viewed and that the stories our reporters put their time into are being read. I love how excited Sarah got about the website views, posting to Twitter as well as Facebook our success. Her enthusiasm always translates into enthusiasm for me. I agree however, that our flyer postings may have been a bit excessive, considering I can’t look around for more that five seconds without seeing a flyer announcing our Facebook page. It is our first year making web this much of an equal to the print issue, and so I think it’s okay for us to go a little overboard. Hard work warrants a few bragging rights, right?

Lessons of the week:

1. Sometimes it’s possible to see the hard proof of the effort that you have been putting in for months. That feels pretty great.

2. People might have violent reactions if we post anymore green “Like us on Facebook” flyers around the school. Our point has definitely been made.

Lesson seven of being an editor-in-chief: check.