2015 State of the Group

Hawaii Web Group’s year in review – By Chris Norberg, Project Manager

What a busy year for Hawaii Web Group! 2014 was a huge year for us, but this year is gone beyond all of our expectations (see the State of the Group 2014 report.) With the growth of our fantastically talented team, we had some extra time to ponder the direction we went in 2015. Some big moments in 2015 include:

• The addition of 2 fantastic workers to our crew (Brita and Naomi, of whom are dominating social media and blogging.)
• Massive growth across our social media accounts.
• A few new clients, including the Maui Tropical Plantation and the Mill House Restaurant.
• The rebuilding of many of our own web assets.
• Our first experience with an international intern.
• The creation of a few new websites including BestMauiActivities.com, SportingClubOfThePacific.com, MillHouseMaui.com, HoloHoloMauiTours.com, BaliInformationGuide.com (rebuild), MauiNutritionalTherapy.com, MauiWhaleWatching.com, SnorkelingMolokini.com, MauiGuide.com, TaqueriaCruz.com, BabyMaui.com, SnubaMaui.com, MauiPhysicalTherapy.com, and our first site in Mandarin Chinese Youzouxiaweiyi.com.

What kind of traffic do our sites enjoy?

An overview of the past and present annual absolute unique visitors (now referred to as “users” by Google Analytics.)

Almost every year we’ve seen our own sites grow with quality traffic due to search engine ranking and social media shares. The only time we’ve had negative growth was in 2013 when we put all of our effort into rebuilding our main site, MauiInformationGuide.com.

We still have quite a lot of sites to rebuild in order to make them faster, responsive, and easier to navigate. Each year, we try to rebuild at least 4 of our own Hawaii Web Group websites.

Hawaii Social Media

Hawaii Web Group’s social media following and current reach.

We’ve had a lot of success with photo/video related social media this year. We’ve had over 5 million new loops this year on Vine, Periscope has taken off pretty quickly, and our Instagram following more than doubled this year!

Social keeps changing, and it’s been a real challenge giving our audiences what they want. We intend to continue learning and growing socially in 2016.

Our Audience

Hawaii Web Group websites’ audience by gender, age, location, device, and socially.

Our websites’ audience has been primarily visitor traffic interested in the island of Maui, Hawaii. This focus will be changing in 2016 as we make more of an effort to reach all island visitors (not just those that love our wonderful island.) You’ll begin to see more sites and social media activity for the other islands.

2016 Goals

Hawaii Web Group continues viral blogging and gets back into web design

Viral blogging has taken most of our time in the last few years. We’ve really only been building a handful of websites per year (and mostly for our own purposes), but in 2016, we’re looking to build more. Our team is really strong and building custom sites (including WordPress) has become our speciality.

Our goal is to give Hawaii businesses the option of updating their sites themselves, pay for quality help if needed, and retain 100% ownership of their sites.

If this sounds interesting to you, give us a shout!