By Cebby
WOW!!! What a crazy year it’s been for UltimateYota! We went from being an idea to a thriving community in much less than our 9 months of existence! A big round of applause to all who have made this possible!
Stats
Our membership has grown to nearly 1300 members and our traffic is through the roof! Our growth has been nearly exponential and has outpaced the growth of similar sites. A few stats for the curious:
 As of today, we’ve had nearly 120,000 visits by 20,000 unique visitors who have had 1,002,234 page views. These visits came from 108 different countries/territories. The average time per visitor to the site is 00:10:35 with an average number of pages viewed being 8.45 per visit.
We've had Google Analytics installed since the inception of the site. It's a great tool for gathering boat loads of data.
Featured Members
Our member-selected Featured Member spot continues to be a big hit. All winners are voted to victory solely by our membership. Can someone derail the So-Cal contingent in 2008? Seems like this may be a tall order as they have dominated over the past 9 months.
We keep all the featured member spots active through our “Channels” menu. Here are this past year’s winners.
Sponsoring Vendors
From day one we’ve realized that the ongoing financial support for UltimateYota would come from our vendors. We have been lucky that a number of great vendors have stepped up to sponsor our community early on. Look to our sponsoring vendors first for your needs – not only will you be getting great service and great prices, but you’ll also be helping the site. Here are our current sponsoring vendors:
We are actively pursuing additional sponsors, so if you know someone who would like to help the site, direct them to one of the staff members and/or to our advertising program page.
The Give-Aways!
We've been very fortunate that our vendors have stepped up and offered give aways for the UY membership. The staff has been thoroughly impressed with the escalating value of the give aways offered. Our advertising terms require one giveaway per year from our sponsoring members, but we only provide a recommended value. Each and every vendor has surpassed our expectations. It is great exposure for our vendors and an excellent prize for some lucky members. It pays to be active on the forum - just ask the winners!!
Here are the past sponsors, their giveaway, and the lucky winners:
Thank you to our sponsoring vendors for a great 2007!! Stay tuned for additional giveaways coming in 2008!!
The Store
 Our store continues to be very popular. Our members can find stickers, a growing apparel line, and our 2008 calendars. We will be adding more apparel items, additional sizes and new colors based on the feedback we've received from our membership. If you'd like to chime in, you can post in this thread . We're also having an apparel color discussion here.
As always, any proceeds from merchandise sales go back into the site.
New Post Tier Titles
Through a member vote (a close one), we’ve implemented new post tiers: | 0-99 posts | | Newbie | | 100-199 posts | | Mall Crawler | | 200-499 posts | | Trail Ready | | 500-1999 posts | | Rock Crawler | | 2000+ posts | | Web Wheeler |
Staff Changes
04 Rocko Taco (Chris) has joined us as a staff member. He replaced Piett who was unable to devote enough time to the staff duties. Chris has already made his presence felt by taking over the featured member duties. Welcome aboard Chris!
Events
 Slosurfer (Chris) organized one heck of a nice event at Pismo this year. The event was heavily attended by the UltimateYota contingent! For more details on this outing, click here.
There have been many other rides and runs that have been organized by UY members and have been reported here . Have a look and get inspired to get out there!!
Site Changes
We just can’t sit still! We are beginning to work on some changes to the site that we plan to implement by our 1st anniversary. We have some pretty cool things in store for our membership, so stay tuned.
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Channels 
