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The BTG NowDateline: 25th January, 2004At the end of December and the beginning of January we looked back at theatre in 2003. In this article we're going to look back at the British Theatre Guide during that year. We began the year with a rapid rise in page views, reaching over 21,000 by the end of January, almost three times what it had been in the same month in 2002. We'd reached a total of 500,000 page views by the end of November. By May 2003 we reached one million and 1.5 by October. By the end of the year we were averaging 32,000 plus, and in the second week of the current month we topped 51,000. Before the end of February we will have reached the 2m mark. We have around 9,000 unique visitors a week and our Newsletter subscription list is rapidly aproaching 1,050. In the visitor survey we conducted during September, it emerged that more than a third of our visitors are professionally involved in theatre (the figure for Newsletter subscribers is somewhat higher) and a further 18% are involved in amateur theatre. An analysis of the site's log files shows that the most visited section of the site is the News section (25% of page views), followed by Reviews (around 22%), Articles and Other Resources, in that order, although the last two do vary from week to week. As a result, during the year we increased our news coverage from the one-page News Digest and the occasional special news feature to a daily news update, giving each story its own page but still retaining the weekly short items digest. We also, at the beginning of the year, added a Latest page, indexing all the new stories during the week. We also increased our Reviews coverage considerably during 2003. Up to August 2001 the only reviews we carried were by Peter Lathan, with occasional contributions by "guest" reviewers. Philip Fisher (London and the Edinburgh Fringe) and Catherine Lamm (New York and the Edinburgh Fringe) joined us in September and then Jackie Fletcher (London) came on board in 2002. During 2003, however, we were joined by Gill Stoker (London/Surrey), Steve Orme (Midlands), Pete Wood (Bristol and the Midlands), Jill Sharp (East Anglia), Rachel Lynn Brody (Edinburgh), Kevin Catchpole (the South East) and David Chadderton (the North West), and in 2004 by another New York correspondent, Julie-Ann Marshall and a second Manchester-based reviewer, Charlotte Payne. As a result, we now have almost 600 reviews online, in addition to about the same number from the Edinburgh Fringe from 1997 to 2003. Back in the 90s it was quite difficult to convince some (quite a few, to be honest) theatres to take theatre websites seriously, but that's all changed and we find that our reviewers are welcomed at every theatre we approach. In fact, now we've got theatres approaching us to send reviewers. All except the Almeida, for some reason - the only theatre in the UK which will not allow us in to review their productions. Another new development in 2003 was the closure of Peter Lathan's other website, The School Show Page, and the transfer of much of its content to the BTG. We are not, it has to be said, much enamoured of the current design of the site and so we are looking at a revamp. No date fixed yet, but watch this space! Articles Indices:
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