New Acton Website looks to create a place for community, online.
We are extremely pleased to welcome you to our new website.
Tirelessly we have been working over the past few months to create the best possible online experience we could for Acton.
The idea for the website was not only to create a sustainable, more environmentally friendly form of communications for Acton but mainly, to bring Acton Together in a way that was previously not done. We wanted to utilize technology in order to bring Acton UP.
In a world where traditional news mediums are dying, an estimated 1/4 people who receive a newspaper actually read it, whereas the decrease for cable television has been even more dramatic, one "Accenture" survey and study has shown that television watching has severely decreased as much as 50% in just the last year.
It would seem that digital is the new frontier. People are opting out of traditional cable for things like Youtube, Netflix, and other streaming services, whereas newspapers and magazines are making the transition to online newspapers or facing the more grim option of bankruptcy.
This is where we come in.
Originally when I had started my media venture in Acton the goal was to create a magazine to bring Acton Together, in fact, that was the original name I had planned for until I found out the name was already taken by an organization who does great work around the community, from our Community Dinners to helping fund the Community Garden. If you are not aware of Acton Together you can check them out here...
Well, I had been involved in the creative side of print media before, the business side of it was completely foreign to me. I was fresh and starry-eyed with my new job as an "associate publisher". I saw all of the potentials with none of the hardships, downfalls or shortcomings that print had.
After multiple months of canvassing for sponsorships, and listening to feedback from various business and citizens I came to terms that print was not the way to go.
Shortly after, myself and Alex Hilson had met and figured out that the internet would be the way. After A few months of branding and planning, we had launched our Youtube show "Acton UP" and its parent company UP Communications.
While our youtube channel has been doing great, it has seen as much as a 200+% increase in viewership and a 50+% increase in time watched per video, there was a problem with it.
The problem was we could not release news fast enough. We spend on average 42 hours to 82 hours on each episode, depending on its length and how much we put into it. Beyond that, there is also the problem of the slow internet in Acton, which adds an additional 16- 32 hours uploading time for a 30min- 1-hour 4k video. The point being, when we got you news, it was no longer new.
Insert superhero music here...
Our solution, the new, " ActonUP.ca ". On Acton UP's new website we can keep news up to the minute. We have utilized various forms of technology so our site is being updated constantly. Beyond that, we have reached out to various community members, leaders, movers and shakers and more so that we can provide you with various news from various sources across Acton and Halton Hills.
We realize there are other forms of online media but what makes us different is we are Acton focused. We are not a huge corporation, but all people who are local to Acton, banded together with the common goal, to bring Acton UP.
We hope you enjoy our new website, in the future we will be adding many new features to it, so stay tuned. Any comments, requests, concerns, and complaints can be sent to us through our contact section, email or any of our various forms of social media.
I have also written a separate article discussing all the new features of the new website, which you can check out in our news section.
Enjoy
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