I'm very proud to reveal that today is

Digital Photography Now's

second birthday!

I officially launched dpnow.com on Monday, 13th August, 2001. As Phil Askey at dpreview.com noted in his kind news story reporting the arrival of dpnow.com on that very day, "Brave webmaster launches on the 13th!"

I'm not superstitious and while it has been a hard slog to keep the site going, it's been marvellous fun.

Regular visitors to this site know that dpnow.com has been a labour of love that has had to fit around my busy career as a freelance journalist. Sometimes the site has unavoidably played second fiddle as a consequence, but those days are in the past and there are genuine plans to move dpnow.com up into another gear.

Site traffic growth, nevertheless, has been strong across the last 24 months:

We now have financing for the next year and we continue to be honoured by the patronage of Olympus UK (who have sponsored us for all but the first three months of our existence).

Our output has grown enormously in the last couple of months, with attention to news in particular paying dividends. The forum, too has been one of the dpnow.com pillars.

There is much in the pipeline, including a revised forum, database-driven buyers guides, a new and better page design with much better navigation, and much more.

From a part time experiment in online publishing in August 2001, by the end of 2003 we are aiming to be a serious player in the online digital photography publishing stakes. By then we hope to have completed all the site developments we have been working on so hard during the last 9 months - most of them unseen, to date.

Exciting times are ahead!

Ian Burley

Founder/editor Digital Photography Now