WoW Hunters Hall is One!
In honor of the occasion I decided to write a little something describing where we came from, who we are, and what we have planned for the future.
The concept for a WoW hunter community portal began with an expression of gratitude sent to Frostheim by Deltá, a hunter just starting college:
I’m starting college in the fall and have gotten into a pretty prestigious college of natural resources, majoring in Wildlife Ecology as any real hunter should ;). The college orientation I attended and my registration for classes were just this previous weekend and sadly most of the fun/interesting classes open to freshmen were already filled. […] Luckily I’m wear my “I’m a Hunter” t-shirt the first day […] We break off into advisory groups dedicated to each major where we actually sign up for classes in the fall. […]
My turn finally arrives and I walk into the office and lo and behold my adviser is sporting the ==<FAIL>== t-shirt. We instantly recognize each other as fellow hunters and spend about fifteen minutes discussing various hunter related information such as interesting ways to spend talents and fun raid stories. Finally we get to my course selection, and the two fun classes I had chosen had of course been filled. My adviser simply says I’m in, as he teaches one of the courses and the other is taught by a friend of his who has been a die hard elemental shaman since vanilla. […]
Thanks to our great community I’m now enrolled into a class that teaches me not only about wildfires, but how to beat them, and a class that opens up every geology course offered at the college. Without rallying points like you, Mania, Zeherah, BRK, and Kripparrian we may have never achieved the great pinnacle that is the hunter community.
After receiving the email, Frostheim was “sitting around musing about the hunter community, all the different sites that we have out there and also a bit how to increase the awareness of all the different sites throughout the hunter community.”
Then I had another one of those ideas that I’m always having that quickly fall into the not enough time category. Except I really like this one. To me it seems awesome.
The project is WoW Hunters Hall. A site designed to be a portal to the hunter community, to support the hunter community and to help grow the hunter community.
For Users: WoW Hunters Hall will provide a one-stop destination for all hunter information. Just hop over to the site and you can easily see all of the new hunter information across the web. You’ll see the articles from your favorite blogs, as well as articles from blogs you may never have heard of. You’ll see the latest hunter news as it happens, and find recaps of forum discussions that save you from sorting through dozens or hundreds of pages of unrelated junk.
For Authors: WoW Hunters Hall will drive more traffic to blogs and forums. It’s a great way to increase the visibility of your blog, and WoW Hunters Hall should make it vastly easier to start a new hunter blog.
Community
A community is a group of individuals who work together to benefit each other. They’re people who have experienced enough of the world, or in this case the World of Warcraft, to realize that by banding together they can overcome far greater obstacles than any one person (or character) could alone. A community strengthens its members with resources, comaraderie, and moral support. We hunters have an enviable community. Hunters do Rhok.
Riding the Waves
As the graph above illustrates, the vast majority of WHH readers were led here initially by referrals, mostly from WHU. However, while the proportion of referred readers is gradually dropping, the proportion of readers who find us using search engines is steadily growing, which is good news: we are coming into our own.
The graph below shows that although Diablo 3, the end of Cataclysm duldrums, and summer vacationing in the northern hemisphere have taken their toll on the number of WoW players in general, WoW Hunters Hall is riding the waves:
The number of hunter resources that we cover has also grown. You might have noticed that we removed the list of sites we follow from the sidebar; that is because we now follow so many sites that the list grew to a ridiculous length. While we started out covering only a handful of the most well-known blogs, WoW Hunters Hall now monitors well over a hundred blogs and YouTube channels for new content of interest to hunters. It has been very satisfying to see the smaller blogs and new YouTube channels we’ve featured here gain readerships and subs and grow. These new authors and producers bring sharp wits and fresh perspectives to the community.
Since its inception a year ago, WoW Hunters Hall has published nearly 900 posts and over 800 unique images to date. We’ve received over 800 genuine comments (which we love!) and there is an awesome guy quietly working in the background who has spared you over 18,000 messages from spammers that would love to sell you their shoes and a host of other products we won’t mention. Thank you Balztrap.
Many Awesome Hunters
This site is not written by one or two people, it’s written by many awesome hunters:
- Bloggers, who take the time to share their expertise and their thoughts in order to further knowledge and stimulate discussion. By making their thoughts and theories public they share something of themselves, giving us the opportunity to consider their opinions and rework their math, gain their knowledge and offer them our feedback.
- Forum Posters, who provide valuable hunter suggestions to the developers, and patiently answer the multitudes of interesting questions about hunters.
- PvPers, who have stayed with the hunter class through thick and thin. They study other class’s abilities in depth then teach us the details we need to know to win, share their hundreds of macros and keybinds, and demonstrate the importance of having a good comp.
- Raiders, who share their strategies and tips, teach us how to optimize our gear, show us the beauty and the fun in raiding, and teach us the importance of getting along with each other.
- Soloers, the true adventurers, who analyze every aspect of an encounter, wiping hundreds of times, and share the knowledge they’ve gained in forums, blogs, and videos, making the road a bit smoother for others who enjoy doing something a little different.
- Theorycrafters, who patiently test, calculate, communicate with the developers, and create tools from which we all benefit greatly.
- Transmoggers, who inspire us with their creativity and prove without a doubt that hunters are by far the most sexy, badass class in the game
The Pandas are Coming
Things have been relatively quiet in the hunter blogosphere lately as they are in the WoW community in general, but that is all about to change… the pandas are coming. As things begin to heat up again, there are a variety of ways that you can help to keep WHH functioning as a central hub for all things hunter and make WHH an even better, more well-rounded site in Pandaria. Some would only require a few seconds of your time but would make a significant difference.
- New Bloggers: If you think you have content of interest to hunters but we don’t yet know you exist, send us a link to your site.
- Established Bloggers: Install the widget that displays the most recent WHH posts on your site. Many of the bloggers we cover have the widget and we greatly appreciate it.
- Videographers: If you produce informative or entertaining hunter-related videos but we don’t seem to know about them, drop us a line.
- Writers: We welcome original hunter-related articles. You can apply to write for WHH here. If you’d like some suggestions on what to write about, our most popular topics at WHH have been addons/UIs, PvP, raid guides, soloing, specs, theorycrafting, and transmogrification.
- Everyone: Link to WoW Hunters Hall. If you’re reading a forum, for example, and see someone asking a question that is answered here, post a link to the information and help your fellow hunters find what they’re looking for.
- Forum Readers: If you regularly read Arena Junkies, MMO Champion, Petopia, Wowhead, or the official WoW hunter forum, we could *really* use your help! I currently cover the Elitist Jerks forums as well as trying to keep an eye on the MMO-C and official WoW forums, but as the Mists of Pandaria expansion nears and all of these sites become much more active, the EJ forum will be all that I can realistically handle. The communities at these sites have much to offer. If you visit one of these forums regularly, please consider sharing important or interesting posts with WHH readers in the form of a weekly summary or recap. You can apply here. We have cake.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at WoW Hunters Hall past, present and future. For me, the past year at WHH has been an incredibly enriching experience. I’ve learned a lot about hunters but also about using the tools and software involved in writing posts. Frostheim has generously been teaching me the basics of SEO. I’ve stepped outside my comfort box and explored hunter playstyles that I’d never seriously considered before. Most importantly, I’ve become acquainted with a lot of awesome hunters.
~Tabana
About the Header Image – Laeleiwyn at World of Lae has an incredibly useful and interesting feature on her site called Hunterstalker. Her gallery of hunters includes statistics, links to blogs and other social media, live armory portraits, and other interesting tidbits of information for many of the hunters we cover at WHH. I captured images of the portraits, scaled them down, and made them into a collage. The Chocolate Celebration Cake in the center is for all of the hunters out there.
Any chance of some banners/button links so those of us who don’t use Word Press can stick a permanent link up to the site on our site? :D
For blogger in setup I added gadget “feed”, named it WoW Hunters Hall, entered as address and chose “show 5 last posts”. :)
I’d really like to have a button or banner if possible so I can set a permanent link to the main front page :D
That’s a great idea. We’re going to try and come up with something like that.
Great summation of the first year of the WHH. And thank you Tabana for doing all the hard work to make it all happen!
Glad you liked it :) I had a lot of fun putting it together.
Cheers !!!!!!!!!! :P From Bulgaria :)))
здравей !!!
I really love this site. Thanks for all the hard work! <3
<3<3
Congratulations on one year of excellence!
And thanks to Frostheim, Tabana, and all of the other great curators and contributors who have worked so hard to make the site what it is today, as well as all of the bloggers, forum contributors, etc. It has become an amazing beast! (Not able to be tamed, though.) :D
Congratulations, this site should be the pillar for hunter information come MoP, as I’m sure it is already. You guys are incredibly hard working and it shows. Raise your glasses or whatever you have in front of you… to many more years.
Happy Birthday, WHH! This is a great site that showcases an even greater community. Thanks to all those working so hard like Tabana, Frostheim, and many many others! :)
Happy bday :D
May we all grow old together :P
Awesome job Tabana. Many hunters have helped contribute through the first year. But Tabana has really become the central foundation that supports this whole thing. Awesome write up!
Thanks for the comments guys. They are much appreciated.
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday to all the hunters out there, thx everything to all the bloggers!
may the jumpshot be with you!
Hello WHH. I’ve been following this site for about a year. Never posted though. I appreciate the time and effort you put into it. I don’t have any content to really give, unless opening satchels is your -thang-.
Wanted to chime in and say the same: thanks for all the hard work that goes into the site, in building the community and in keeping it going through thick and thin content. :)