Since the relaunch, we have added even more features to both sites. We redesigned our site in late 2007 to make it easier to navigate and provide more features.

We introduced a new video player that is considered one of the best in the industry on both the regular and varsity sites. While we are still pretty new to the video game, we are working hard to bring you the most compelling local video of events from our area. Sports has been going crazy with game footage, coach and player interviews. They even started their own talk show during football season called “The Big Show.” While these guys will never win any Emmys or Oscars, they have promise in being very funny while giving you recaps of the games and sports news. Hopefully they will start the show up again soon. Dennis, Matt and Brian also have their own blogs that will be showing up on myjournalcouriervarsity.com very soon. Check them out and find out what they have to say and start up a conversation. Isn’t that what these blogs are all about?

This past August, we launched another site, myjournalcouriervarsity.com. This is a Web site entirely devoted to prep sports in our area.

Nowhere ever before in our area has there been one place on the Web where all the sports fans in our area (and you all are nuts about prep sports) can get all of the action. A ton of credit goes to Dennis Mathes, the sports editor for the JJ-C and all his reporters, Brian Webster, Matt Wing, Tanya Hoots and the many stringers and coaches that help us get all this information onto the site.

I can tell you all, when you go from only getting a few stats that you know are the only things you can fit into the paper to asking for, recording and inputing every stat you can get your hands on, it was a huge feat! The entire sports staff worked many sleepless nights getting this info into the system for you all to enjoy.

We went from 14,000 page views and 826 unique monthly visitors to over 106,000 page views and 5,500 unique monthly visitors in just two months. That is phenomenal and I can’t tell you how excited our sports staff was at the acceptance of their hard work.