Editor's Focus: June 2001

This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. - Western Union internal memo, 1876.

When we launched our Internet initiative four years ago, plenty of people thought we were crazy. At that time, no one was making any money online and the phrase "dot-com IPO" hadn’t become an investment philosophy.

Corporately, however, we have always bet on technology to make sure we were ahead of the proverbial curve to compensate for the fact that our company is nowhere near as big as our competitors. In fact, our first foray into the Web world occurred in 1991 when we built a dial-up network for the readers of one of our other publications. That effort failed, and we lost money. But we learned valuable lessons from the experience.

Lawn & Landscape Online came to life in 1997 because we thought this industry was ready to embrace technology. We still jumped the gun to some degree – the number of Lawn & Landscape readers using the Internet was 30 percent in 1997, but it was nearly 60 percent by 1999 and continues to climb.

As a result, Lawn & Landscape Online generates more than 75,000 visits a month. That means www.lawnandlandscape.com gets typed in on someone’s computer more than 2,500 times each day. What users clearly appreciate the most about the site is the Message Boards – an opportunity to post questions and answers about key issues and see what other contractors think. At the time I write this, more than 13,000 messages have been posted by more than 420 contractors. The ongoing dialogue offers valuable insight on a range of issues from people with real experience.

Of course, regardless of how popular the site becomes, I don’t expect you to favor online magazine reading over receiving this printed product every month. But the digital domain lets us provide you with even more information. A sad reality of magazine journalism is that we have limited space to fill with our "brilliant" words each month.

Now, we can put that information to use online. Just keep your eyes open for this icon – its presence in an article means you can get even more information about that article by visiting www.lawnandlandscape.com and finding that particular article under our magazine section.

So check us out online, and remember our experience when you’re considering new technology. An element of uncertainty and a chance of failure will always be present in such a decision, but sometimes we all need to be a little crazy.