WoW Hunters Hall is One!

WoW Hunters Hall is One!

In honor of the occasion I decided to write a little something describing where we came from, who we are, and what we have planned for the future.

 

I’m a Hunter

The concept for a WoW hunter community portal began with an expression of gratitude sent to Frostheim by Deltá, a hunter just starting college:

I’m starting college in the fall and have gotten into a pretty prestigious college of natural resources, majoring in Wildlife Ecology as any real hunter should ;). The college orientation I attended and my registration for classes were just this previous weekend and sadly most of the fun/interesting classes open to freshmen were already filled. […] Luckily I’m wear my “I’m a Hunter” t-shirt the first day […] We break off into advisory groups dedicated to each major where we actually sign up for classes in the fall. […]

My turn finally arrives and I walk into the office and lo and behold my adviser is sporting the ==<FAIL>==  t-shirt. We instantly recognize each other as fellow hunters and spend about fifteen minutes discussing various hunter related information such as interesting ways to spend talents and fun raid stories.  Finally we get to my course selection, and the two fun classes I had chosen had of course been filled. My adviser simply says I’m in, as he teaches one of the courses and the other is taught by a friend of his who has been a die hard elemental shaman since vanilla. […]

Thanks to our great community I’m now enrolled into a class that teaches me not only about wildfires, but how to beat them, and a class that opens up every geology course offered at the college. Without rallying points like  you, Mania, Zeherah, BRK, and Kripparrian we may have never achieved the great pinnacle that is the hunter community.

After receiving the email, Frostheim was “sitting around musing about the hunter community, all the different sites that we have out there and also a bit how to increase the awareness of all the different sites throughout the hunter community.”

Frostheim

Then I had another one of those ideas that I’m always having that quickly fall into the not enough time category. Except I really like this one. To me it seems awesome.

The project is WoW Hunters Hall. A site designed to be a portal to the hunter community, to support the hunter community and to help grow the hunter community.

For Users: WoW Hunters Hall will provide a one-stop destination for all hunter information. Just hop over to the site and you can easily see all of the new hunter information across the web. You’ll see the articles from your favorite blogs, as well as articles from blogs you may never have heard of. You’ll see the latest hunter news as it happens, and find recaps of forum discussions that save you from sorting through dozens or hundreds of pages of unrelated junk.

For Authors: WoW Hunters Hall will drive more traffic to blogs and forums. It’s a great way to increase the visibility of your blog, and WoW Hunters Hall should make it vastly easier to start a new hunter blog.

Hunter Class Drinks from Frikky

Community

A community is a group of individuals who work together to benefit each other. They’re people who have experienced enough of the world, or in this case the World of Warcraft, to realize that by banding together they can overcome far greater obstacles than any one person (or character) could alone. A community strengthens its members with resources, comaraderie, and moral support. We hunters have an enviable community.  Hunters do Rhok.

The graph shows the percentage of visitors that arrived at WoW Hunters Hall from various sources. It indicates that search engine traffic is overtaking referrals as the means by which visitors find our site.

 

Riding the Waves

As the graph above illustrates, the vast majority of WHH readers were led here initially by referrals, mostly from WHU. However, while the proportion of referred readers is gradually dropping, the proportion of readers who find us using search engines is steadily growing, which is good news: we are coming into our own.

The graph below shows that although Diablo 3, the end of Cataclysm duldrums, and summer vacationing in the northern hemisphere have taken their toll on the number of WoW players in general, WoW Hunters Hall is riding the waves:

The graph shows the total number of visits WoW Hunters Hall received and the number that originated from search engines, referrals, and direct visits.

 

The number of hunter resources that we cover has also grown. You might have noticed that we removed the list of sites we follow from the sidebar; that is because we now follow so many sites that the list grew to a ridiculous length. While we started out covering only a handful of the most well-known blogs, WoW Hunters Hall now monitors well over a hundred blogs and YouTube channels for new content of interest to hunters. It has been very satisfying to see the smaller blogs and new YouTube channels we’ve featured here gain readerships and subs and grow. These new authors and producers bring sharp wits and fresh perspectives to the community.

Since its inception a year ago, WoW Hunters Hall has published nearly 900 posts and over 800 unique images to date. We’ve received over 800 genuine comments (which we love!) and there is an awesome guy quietly working in the background who has spared you over 18,000 messages from spammers that would love to sell you their shoes and a host of other products we won’t mention. Thank you Balztrap.

Many Awesome Hunters

This site is not written by one or two people, it’s written by many awesome hunters:


The Pandas are Coming

Things have been relatively quiet in the hunter blogosphere lately as they are in the WoW community in general, but that is all about to change… the pandas are coming. As things begin to heat up again, there are a variety of ways that you can help to keep WHH functioning as a central hub for all things hunter and make WHH an even better, more well-rounded site in Pandaria. Some would only require a few seconds of your time but would make a significant difference.

  • New Bloggers: If you think you have content of interest to hunters but we don’t yet know you exist, send us a link to your site.
  • Established Bloggers: Install the widget that displays the most recent WHH posts on your site. Many of the bloggers we cover have the widget and we greatly appreciate it.
  • Videographers: If you produce informative or entertaining hunter-related videos but we don’t seem to know about them, drop us a line.
  • Writers: We welcome original hunter-related articles. You can apply to write for WHH here. If you’d like some suggestions on what to write about, our most popular topics at WHH have been addons/UIs, PvP, raid guides, soloing, specs, theorycrafting, and transmogrification.
  • Everyone: Link to WoW Hunters Hall. If you’re reading a forum, for example, and see someone asking a question that is answered here, post a link to the information and help your fellow hunters find what they’re looking for.
  • Forum Readers: If you regularly read Arena Junkies, MMO Champion, Petopia, Wowhead, or the official WoW hunter forum, we could *really* use your help! I currently cover the Elitist Jerks forums as well as trying to keep an eye on the MMO-C and official WoW forums, but as the Mists of Pandaria expansion nears and all of these sites become much more active, the EJ forum will be all that I can realistically handle. The communities at these sites have much to offer. If you visit one of these forums regularly, please consider sharing important or interesting posts with WHH readers in the form of a weekly summary or recap. You can apply here. We have cake.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at WoW Hunters Hall past, present and future. For me, the past year at WHH has been an incredibly enriching experience. I’ve learned a lot about hunters but also about using the tools and software involved in writing posts. Frostheim has generously been teaching me the basics of SEO. I’ve stepped outside my comfort box and explored hunter playstyles that I’d never seriously considered before. Most importantly, I’ve become acquainted with a lot of awesome hunters.

Live to Rhok.

~Tabana

About the Header ImageLaeleiwyn at World of Lae has an incredibly useful and interesting feature on her site called Hunterstalker. Her gallery of hunters includes statistics, links to blogs and other social media, live armory portraits, and other interesting tidbits of information for many of the hunters we cover at WHH. I captured images of the portraits, scaled them down, and made them into a collage. The Chocolate Celebration Cake in the center is for all of the hunters out there.

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