Happy New Year and Message to our Readers Worldwide!

First, we’d like to wish all our readers a happy, safe, and prosperous New Year. We hope that, in 2011, you’ll have time to enjoy your precision rifles, and spend more time at the range, hopefully with good friends who share your “addiction to accuracy”. We’ve made some major upgrades to the site this year, and our audience is bigger than ever. We hope you’ll continue to enjoy our feature articles, our daily news reports, our match reports, our video collection, and our Free Forum Classifieds.

Major Site Redesign Accomplished in 2010
2010 was a big year for the site. First our traffic grew substantially. AccurateShooter.com is now accessed by more than 100,000 unique users every week. In November we completed a major site upgrade, a “nose to tail” rebuild that required hundreds of man-hours of work. We’ve expanded the layout to provide more room for photos and videos. The entire site was rebuilt, page by page, on a sophisticated content management system (CMS). Our new CMS allows easier, faster searching, and category-based navigation. The CMS also automatically links readers to related articles and relevant gear reviews. This provides a richer browsing experience — you can find more cool stuff on every visit. The new site format also allows us to integrate popular articles that originally appeared in our Daily Bulletin.

Forum Membership Grows 30%
We experienced big growth in our Forum as well. Membership grew by 30% as member ranks swelled from 10,000 members to 13,000 members! The Forum Classifieds section, with a new seller/buyer feedback system, is more active than ever.

Daily Bulletin Is a Big Hit
The AccurateShooter Daily Bulletin has become a “must read” for anyone interested in serious rifle accuracy. We launched a bigger, more colorful Bulletin layout in April, and now we now have 12,000 average pageviews a day, up from about 8,500 last year. 365 days a year we offer a unique combination of shooting tips, gear reviews, industry news, and highlighted bargains and special sales.

Big Plans for 2011 — With Your Help…
In the months ahead we plan to release more Cartridge Guides, more Gun Profiles, and some major gear comparison tests. We also plan to do audio interviews (“podcasts”) with top shooters such as Sgt. Sherri Gallagher, Sam Hall, and John Whidden. And we’ll continue to offer timely match reports and inside “scoops” on the latest precision shooting products.

We need your support. For over six years the site has relied largely on volunteer efforts by dedicated shooters. But as the site grows, adding new types of content and more sophisticated features, we need the assistance of knowledgeable programmers, database experts and web designers. Those guys don’t work for glory alone.

For the site to continue to expand its content, we need to bring in paid helpers. Right now, the site reaches over 100,000 shooters every WEEK. If the majority of those users could provide a small donation every year, we could deliver MORE stories, MORE tests, MORE Gun of the Week features, and provide more of the photos and videos everyone enjoys.

In the past quarter about 60 site users have generously donated to the site. I want to again thank all those who have contributed. But that still leaves tens of thousands of users who access the site regularly without contributing.

Here’s our proposal. First, if you have used our FREE Classifieds to successfully sell your rifles or shooting gear, consider sending in a dollar or two from your sale proceeds. Second, for those who use the site regularly, consider donating One Dollar a Month. That’s less than the price of a cup of coffee and much less than many websites now charge for their “premium content areas”.

Consider this — what do you pay for a movie ticket these days? Probably $8.00 or more for 90 minutes of escapism. For a buck a month ($12 a year) you can help this site provide a YEAR’s worth of info, tests, and shooting news that you won’t find anywhere else.

If you don’t like Paypal, you can send a check. Make the check payable to our Asst. Editor Jason Baney, list your Forum Name (if any), and mail the check to:

Jason Baney
P.O. Box 105
Montoursville, PA 17754

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Tags: 2011, Donation, New Years, Site Redesign