The Wayne Stater last Friday blew out the candles for its one-year anniversary of the online edition.

Nikita Rector, a student at Wayne State College who graduates in May, is the associate editor-in-chief and full-time website editor of the school paper. She brought the idea for the online version of the newspaper when she transferred to WSC in August 2013.

Max McElwain, the faculty advisor for the Wayne Stater, was approached by Rector with the idea.

McElwain gave her the go, and the process began. Wanting to make it simple, she decided to run the website through a program called Student Newspapers Online (SNO), which is hosted through WordPress.

“That’s a simple program that allows virtually anyone to post in a newspaper format very easily, without knowing a lot of the coding,” Rector said. “This will allow me to train other editors to post stories, eventually establishing a twenty-four-hour news cycle.”

Getting the Stater online, however, was not simple.

When meeting with Network and Technical Services (NATS) at WSC in fall 2013, she was informed that WSC wanted the Stater to wait until the college could put them under their new Content Management System (CMS) that they were preparing to launch.

After discussions between the Stater and WSC administration as well as strong support shown from Dr. Steve Elliott, Dean of Arts and Humanities, permission was finally granted on Jan. 20. Rector spent nearly every night from that point until the Jan. 29 launch date, building the website from the ground up.

How’d that launch do, by the way?

After one year, the website has had over 28,000 total pageviews. During the first week, at its peak, the website had 1,121 views for the day.

The highest number of page views the website received on a single day was when the Homecoming Candidates for WSC were announced on Sept. 24, receiving 1,187 views.

So congratulations, Jacob Zeiss, you broke the Internet.

Other dates receiving spikes in page views were the one-year anniversary of the October tornado in Wayne and Dec 10, when Tau Kappa Epsilon was suspended.

The Wayne Stater is currently in the process of adding archives of previous issues, spanning 2007 to present, to the website.

Rector said there are also plans to utilize live twitter feeds, videos, online polls, photo galleries, and other features to draw in more people in the future. The Stater also has had to prepare for when Rector graduates in May. She will be replaced by Amanda Krehbiel, the Stater’s current assistant online editor.

“The online Stater really transforms the paper and provides unlimited opportunities for student journalists,” McElwain said.

One bizarre fact about the online Stater is that two percent of its views come from the country of Brazil. The United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, Greece, Italy, India and Germany make up an additional two percent of total views.

“I’m very proud of where we are. In one year, we have gotten 28,000 views that we previously couldn’t have had with just a print-version. It is amazing for a college newspaper in Wayne, America,” Rector said.

“We are able to reach a much larger market than ever before, and I can’t wait to pass on the torch and see how it grows in the future.”

Statistics: 

• 9,482 Users
• 12,408 Sessions
• 28,830 Total Pageviews
• 2.32 Pages/Session
• 00:01:33 Average Session Duration
• 69.43% Bounce Rate
• 76.39% New Sessions