Last week, the team at NZLive.com celebrated our second birthday. And it’s been a great year for us.

Our traffic has more than doubled this year! So far in 2008 we’ve had 806,421 visits from New Zealanders and international tourists checking out New Zealand culture, compared to just 350,913 visits for the same period in 2007.

Our directory of cultural organisations is growing too. Each month new groups are asking to be listed so that they can enter their events information onto the website for free. There are now over 525 organisations in the directory - up from around 350 at launch.

We’ve also published more than 50 articles about New Zealand culture on the site. From New Zealand Book Month to Music Month, from cycling the Otago Rail Trail to Words on Wheels, from Waitangi Day to Big Day Out, from Auckland to Southland, from sculpture to sport - we’ve got New Zealand culture covered.

We’re promoting culture and events in more places!
In the last year, we’ve also worked really hard to develop the NZLive.com Network, so that the events listed on NZLive.com are on as many other sites as possible. To get maximum exposure for our organisations and events we’re now sending events from NZLive out to more than 50 other websites. The NZLive.com team is happy to be connecting more and more people to New Zealand’s cultural events and organisations.

Our free online funding tool: the Cultural Funding Guide
The Cultural Funding Guide has gone from strength to strength and more than 10% of our traffic now comes from people using this free tool to find possible funding matches for their cultural projects. So if you’re looking for funding opportunities, check out the Funding Guide.

NZLive rates in Plain English awards
We’re also delighted that on our birthday last week we got an honourable mention at the WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards. The award for the Best Plain English Website (public sector) site went to our colleagues at Te Ara, The Encyclopedia of New Zealand so we’re stoked for them too.

Here’s what the judges had to say about NZLive.com:

The simplicity of the concept behind this website—‘what, where, when’—establishes a very good framework for what will increasingly become an excellent public resource.

We’re really pleased with the success of NZLive.com so far and look forward to another successful year ahead!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Culture online, NZLive.com, Building audiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.