IT is a cold December morning with a light layer of frost on the holly berries by our parking lot.  The sun is trying to peek over the mountain ridge that I can see from my office window. The beauty of East Tennessee is hard to beat regardless of the time of year.  If your travels take you near Knoxville, please give us a call, we would like to get to know you and we may be able to rustle up a cup of coffee.

While many folks are out trying to find Christmas presents or perhaps working hard to finish a kitchen before the holidays, we are busy working on the new Slippery Rock Gazette website (www.slipperyrockgazette.net).   Phase 1 is finished. This includes free classified ads as well as the current issue and 27 prior issues that have been archived and are now available for searches.

It looks like the word is getting out about our new site.  We have had quite a few people take advantage of our free classified ads. We are also able to use several tools including Google Analytics to measure traffic.  Based on our previous experience with websites, it looks like we will need to be expanding server capacity very soon.

Phase 2 is scheduled for testing and completion in January. It will include an industry directory of manufacturers. Many manufacturers in our industry are small and do not have big advertising budgets or money for extensive website search engine optimization.  We hope to be able to provide a service to help fabricators find the websites of suppliers in an easy to use, organized format.

I would really appreciate your comments and suggestions for the new website.  We want this site to be useful to you, our readers.

Please send your ideas to me, c/o publisher@slipperyrockgazette.net

Thanks for reading. Here’s to the best year, ever, for all of us. 

Rich Hassert