Football Week 2

About 5 or 6 years ago I had this "great" idea to do online slide shows for football season. At the time we were getting one, maybe two photos published in the following day's paper. I felt it was kind of pointless to go shoot a whole game for only two pix. It allowed be to go to a game and be lazy.
So, I got our web guy who was too busy to teach me how to do the slide shows since he had way to many other things to be done on a nightly basis. Well, now it has pretty much morphed into something that was a novelty to something expected. Last year, I didn't do it the first couple weeks (long story, but basically it was a protest and here isn't the place to go into it, besides it's all been resolved) and I was told that hits to our high school football web site took a 20% cut in the number of hits to the site. This year I'm told we are getting 15,000-20,000 hits a week. Now granted, clicking on a photo constitutes a hit, but I've been told we are getting 1,000-1,200 unique viewers a week, which would put those numbers among the top 5 most popular stories a week.

What's the point to all of this? Well, the slideshows have done a lot more for me than just allowing me to showcase more than two photos a week. I figured while people love to look at action photos, no one wants to sit through 30 photos of people running or throwing the ball. But if you throw in some other photos of the band, fans and other featurey stuff the slideshows are a lot more interesting. Doing this made me a lot more aware of everything going on in the stadium not just what was going on on the field. It also provided a challenge which keeps the bordeom away to constantly be looking for not only great action but something different every week. I've always enjoyed shooting football, but now this just makes it even more fun, espcially when you find a shot of a little kid eating a lollipop trying to figure out why the blue man group showed up at a high school football game.