Happy New Year, Upshur County!

Let the confetti fly: My Buckhannon is kicking off our first full year in 2019. We have a huge – HUGE – to-do list ready for the new year, but before we get to that, let’s peek back at our first three months.

My Buckhannon officially launched on Sept. 27, 2018, and frankly, we weren’t sure what to expect.

A locally-owned, online-only professional media company focused on community news in a small town in West Virginia? Would we get a hundred clicks or a hundred thousand?

You won’t believe the actual number. In the three months since we launched, the My Buckhannon website delivered 275,940 page views, reaching 65,453 users. To handle all that traffic, we had to upgrade our webhosting plan just TWO DAYS after we went live.

Overwhelmed? Oh yeah. Amazed? You bet. Humbled? Totally. Grateful? So much.

Same story on social media. Our Facebook posts racked up more than 1.5 million impressions from 654,000 people. That’s like a third of the entire state of West Virginia.

So yeah, it’s safe to say 2018 was our best year yet (wink).

But what’s next?

During the winter months, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and go under the hood to make sure the site keeps purring along. Just today, we implemented a major update to our membership system, and we recently upgraded our hosting (again) to make the site even faster and more robust.

While you might not SEE these changes, you will FEEL them as My Buckhannon hums along and we add new features.

But not all the changes are happening behind the scenes. We’re always looking for ways to improve the user experience on our website, and one thing you might notice is our new online checkout process, which we’ve broken down into bite-sized steps.

When you purchase anything from our digital marketplace – whether that’s a premium membership or a photo or a piece of local artwork — you’ll be guided through the various checkout stages: logging in (if you already have an account), entering your billing info, reviewing your order and finally submitting your payment information.

It’s a small change, but we are totally committed to making My Buckhannon easy, exciting and secure for everyone on every device. So if you’ve been holding out on becoming a member, give it a shot. It’s easier than you might think, and your support will help us make 2019 even better.

(By the way, we really love feedback, so please reach out to us if you have any comments, suggestions, complaints, whatever. We want to hear from our community!)

Many more features will be rolling out to My Buckhannon in the coming months as we hunker down at our keyboards on these cold winter days. And don’t worry — we’re not neglecting our news coverage or digital marketing efforts for local businesses, so stay tuned for more on those fronts soon.

To all our readers, thank you for helping us take our first step in 2018 – well, it was more like a leap. A really big, awesome leap.

We can’t wait to see what 2019 brings.

–Cheers, from the whole My Buckhannon team