Sentinel.com blog

We have soft-launched a new website within the Santa Cruz Sentinel, reaching out the Santa Cruz visitors in a completely new way with “Destination Santa Cruz.”

Built using Rebelmouse to manage stories, photos and social posts from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Media Lab members and others around Santa Cruz County, we’re linking to the best and latest stories, events and information for visitors to Santa Cruz.

We’re also providing advertisers with a wide variety of possibilities for reaching out to visitors, managing their ad postings through Rebelmouse, and offering to connect local tourism related businesses to social followers of Destination Santa Cruz on Twitter and Facebook.

We believe that anyone considering visiting Santa Cruz will find all they need, including connections to the Sentinel calendar, an opportunity to book reservations and the most recent news about all that Santa Cruz has to offer.
Posts will include Arts & Entertainment coverage from longtime Sentinel writer Wallace Baine on the Muse Santa Cruz blog, the Sentinel’s outstanding food and dining coverage, the Sentinel’s best calendar listings, and links out to great posts from around the county.

Thanks to Christina Gullickson and Shannon Burns for their work in conceiving and designing the site.

The Sentinel reached more than 500,000 unique visitors in the month of February and our sites and apps generated more than 6 million page views.

To advertise on Destination Santa Cruz, call 831-706-3274.

Thanks to everyone who was out covering the Wharf to Wharf for the Sentinel

A few notes – we’ve had close to 40,000 page views for Wharf to Wharf coverage.

Monday’s single day traffic was more than 140,000 page views and Sunday’s traffic was close to 100,000, when we’re typically at 80,000 on Sundays, and right around 100,000 on Mondays.

Among highlights online – we had live updates, including photos, video, and twitter posts from throughout the race route as the event was happening. Sports intern Isis Roberts, Internet director Mike Blaesser and freelancer Cameron Moody were among Sentinel staffers sending photos and updates. Isis and Cameron also composed video reports.

Here’s what the live feed looked like

The feed also pulled in others using twitter to talk about the race – hundreds of updates, and more than 3,000 people clicked the feed

We had more than 50 photos submitted by viewers along the route and posted them automatically here

Stories were posted throughout the afternoon, by Julie Jag, Isis and Cathy Kelly.

We sent video to the home page, to the live feed and to youtube, getting more than 2,000 video views.

The highlight, though, is Sentinel photographer Shmuel Thaler’s slide show, which has received about 3,500 page views.

We also tweeted and let our fans on Facebook know about all of the above.

Thanks again!

Tom and the web team