Looking Back: Today Buy-n-Shoot.com turned 3 years old. But it was December 01, 2001 when the site was first set live on the internet, and it all began. The first three months proved to be a very steep and stressful learning curve even with months of planning behind the launch. Looking back now we can laugh, but the many troubles we had with our service provider at the time [known very well by many Australians] provided headaches of all sorts - needless to say we departed from them very quickly.

Our launch in 2001 involved a billboard for 6 months on one of Melbourne's [Australia] busy roads, ad campaigns in many of Australia's largest photography magazines and newspapers, and a 7,000+ land mail out to put the site in front of thousands of people with an interest in photography.

In the space of just 12 months, news of the site had spread Australia wide, with visitors flocking to Buy-n-Shoot.com to place their ads for used camera gear and photography services, trading [to our surprise] on many occasions with people interstate. Today this is a regular event.

It was shortly after that we introduced a radically different version of our site with [at the time] much improved navigation and a far cleaner finish. This also allowed for the ability to publish news articles on the home page from sponsors and affiliates for the first time, to the delight of many visitors.

With the introduction of news articles in the second year of trade, the website traffic increased considerably as search engines scouring the internet linked our articles to their 'keyword' searches. Today Buy-n-Shoot.com features with over 150 keyword searches on the Google search engine in the top 10, with over half of those at No.1.

Furthermore, the introduction shortly after this of 'camera reviews' also proved to be a hit, both with sponsors and visitors. These independent reviews have now been picked up by many other photography sites around the world driving traffic to Buy-n-Shoot.com from all corners of the globe.

Late in the 2nd year of trade [just 8 days ago] on November 22, 2004 Buy-n-Shoot.com again launched a fresh restyled version [Version3.0] of the website to cater to visitor feedback, and the increasing volume of traffic - which averages near 25,000 visitors per month. The new site now has Australia's best archive of photography industry news [from sponsors], remodelled and easier to read camera reviews and a 'one-step' navigation system to get visitors the information they're after, quicker!

The Buy-n-Shoot.com team are now looking forward to a busier and more exciting future than ever as the website continues to grow and evolve. We would like to thank the 4,000 plus subscribers to our monthly newsletter e.SHOOT, the thousands of visitors each month who return for updates and all of our advertisers who show belief in what we are doing by using our service. This support helps maintain Buy-n-Shoot.com as Australia's largest online photography news, reviews and classified service - so we are very grateful and thankyou for your contribution.

Regards,
Michael Gazzola
Managing Director.