The British Theatre Guide: Now We Are Two

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Now We Are Two

Dateline: 16th November, 2003

Tomorrow, Monday 17th November, is the British Theatre Guide's second birthday. In that first week back in November 2002, we had page views of 1,899 and 173 unique visitors. By the beginning of January we'd increased to over 5,000 page views and up to 8,000 by the end of the month. Since then? Well, let's just say the increase simce that first week has been over well over 1,500%.

A few other facts and figures:

We have published over 400 feature articles, 550 reviews, 28 interviews, 400 Edinburgh Fringe reviews, 880 news pages and 100 pages devoted to actors, in addition to a small selection of othe pages which are on a varied range of topics
Nearly 1,000 people read the Newsletter every week
We have threee reviewers in London, one in the South East, one in East Anglia, two in the Midlands, one in the North West, one in the North East, one in Scotland and one in New York City
Over a third of our visitors are professionally involved in theatre and a quarter of them are actors
6% are over 61 and less than 1% under 18. The rest are more or less equally divided with the 41 to 50 year olds leading 19 to 30 year olds by a massive 4%!
News is the most popular section with Reviews and Articles more or less fighting it out for second place.

That's the past and present: what of the future?

To begin with, we are working on a new design. It is quite obvious to anyone with any artistic sensitivity that I am not a graphic designer, so we're working with a professional on the new design and it looks good. We've still a way to go, so there's no timetable for its completion yet. But watch this space!

We are also actively looking for reviewers in parts of the country which we don't currently reach - check out our Be a Reviewer page if you're interested. As reviewers also act as news correspondents, this will also widen our news coverage.

We're also looking at some of the suggestions made in our Survey to see how well we can implement them. One suggestion was for more profiles of producers and this week we have an in-depth interview with Marc Sinden and are lining up others for the near-future.

Special theatre ticket offers are something else we are looking at. There's one (Riverside Studios in February) for Newsletter subscribers only this week - you'll have to subscribe if you're interested! - but we hope to have more general offers available soon.

We are always interested in hearing what our visitors think and in their suggestions. Please don't hesitate to contact us with compliments, criticisms, suggestions, ideas - but if you're at college or school, please don't ask us to do your latest essay/project for you! We're always glad to answer queries and questions, but "please send me all the information you have about..." will not get a helpful answer!

Articles Indices:

Articles from 2004
Articles from 2003
Articles from 2002
Articles from 2001
Articles from 2000
Articles from 1999
Articles from 1998
Articles from 1997