DPN progress report

1st December - 2001
By Ian Burley

Digital Photography Now - yes; the Web magazine you’re reading right now, is entering its 5th calendar month. In November DPN served 35,000 visitors and exceeded a million ‘hits’ (object requests) in that 30 day period.

That already makes DPN one of the most active UK-based Web magazines dedicated to digital photography.

Average daily page view growth has tripled in the last 10 weeks and the rate of growth in all our access statistics is climbing.

Jump to:

• Growth is great despite expectations
• We’ve signed our first commercial sponsor
• Momentum is gathering
• Other ways of supporting DPN

Growth is great despite expectations

This growth is encouraging because by my own original expectations, the site’s schedule for feature roll-out has slipped. I’d expected the discussion forum to be working by now - it’s running, but you can’t see it as we’re still refining it. The local search engine isn’t quite ready yet and some of you have noticed we haven’t published any camera tests so far. That will be rectified soon.

DPN is basically run by me, with some occasional enthusiastic assistance and encouragement by a great band of friends (click here) and until the site is big enough and good enough to earn some money, I’m having to share the site development time with paid work writing articles for other magazines to help keep me and my family out of the poor house!

We’ve signed our first commercial sponsor

So it’s with great excitement that I can reveal that DPN has signed its first big-name commercial sponsor; Olympus UK.

DPN will be running Olympus promotions and hosting a dealer database from next week. None of this will be at the expense of editorial impartiality, I hasten to add.

It’s chicken and egg at this stage - but with deals like this, I can spend more time on the site and hopefully that will prove to be a growing tendency.

While Olympus represents a real breakthrough for DPN, I’m extremely grateful for Canon and HP, as well as Olympus and now, this month, Softwrap/Cent’sSoftware, who have all donated prizes for you, the reader, to have a go at winning via the newsletter registration page. To date, we’ve given away nearly £2,000 worth of goodies from these donors.

Momentum is gathering

DPN’s momentum is beginning to gather. This month we’re mentioned in Digital Photo User magazine. This follows mentions in What Digital Camera, Digital Photographer and Creative Imaging, plus Phil Askey’s Digital Photography Review mega-site. I’m not forgetting the dozens of you who have kindly linked to DPN from your own sites, plus the 1,500 or so who have bookmarked DPN - 500 alone in the last month.

There is still much to do and, as already mentioned, progress has been frustratingly slower than I’d hoped, but - without making specific promises - I can promise that some major additions to the site will be made during December. Keep coming back and see for yourself!

Other ways of supporting DPN

We’re currently an affiliate of Fotango (see the front page for a banner link)  the online photo sharing and photo printing service. This is a UK-founded and based company and, interestingly, it was recently acquired by Canon. At the moment there is an introductory offer for some free 5x7 enlargements. All print orders placed via DPN’s banner link to Fotango earn us a 10% commission.

You may also have noticed the Ask Jeeves search form icons on many of our latest pages - use one of those to answer a question and you also earn a few pence towards the development of this site.

What can we do for you in return? - because that’s really what this site is all about. We’ve had hundreds of emails with problems that need solving, friendly encouragement and occasionally - *very* occasionally - a criticism. We welcome any of this feedback - click here to give us your own opinion.

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