Today – 10th January 2024 - is the 10th Anniversary of the launch of the Ice Hockey Review grass roots ice hockey website.
We had, in fact, already been posting ice hockey news since 2011, covering the Fylde Flyers’ debut ENL season on our “Paul & Lucy’s Best Kept Secrets” website and later branched out to cover general ENL weekend round ups as well.
However, it was pointed out by some ice hockey fans that, as there was so much other interesting material also being constantly put up on the Best Kept Secrets website – theatre reviews, café news, local music, arts and culture, other sports etc - it was difficult to separate out the ice hockey stories and, thus, the idea for a dedicated ice hockey news website came about.
On that first day, just to have something to start off with, I posted adverts for the various ice hockey books and souvenir programmes that I had already published (click here to view story) and then, on 14th January, posted the first weekend round up of the action in NIHL North Divisions 1 and 2 (click here). This was back in the days before the NIHL got very much media coverage, so was quite innovative for its time.
At the time of writing, the website has now attracted over 396.000 hits – working out at around 39.600 a year, 3.300 a month and an average of 110 per day over the 10 years – which is absolutely fantastic and I would like to thank everybody for their long suffering support. Long may it continue!
A Few Facts and Figures
810 news items have been posted on www.icehockeyreview.co.uk in the 10 years from 10th January 2014 to 10th January 2024
The most read individual story was posted on 30th June 2018 and concerned the legendary recruitment drive for the Widnes Wild women’s team which got 3.500 views, and helped build the team that went on to win the league title in 2019/20 (click here to see story).
According to the stats, peak general reading for the website - for some reason or other, possibly a lot of people were bored during a lockdown somewhere - was in April 2021 with 13.880 page views.
