About LorainCounty.com

LorainCounty.com is an on-line platform for the exchange of local information, ideas and commerce in Lorain County, Ohio.

Each month, over 45,000 people use LorainCounty.com and visit over 2,500,000 pages on the site. LorainCounty.com is privately held and is financially supported by site and weekly sponsors.

Objectives

To be a vital resource for Lorain County, its residents, businesses, and organizations by providing and linking to high quality, community related content and services on the Internet.

To generate revenue by offering marketing, advertising and e-commerce opportunities on the Internet to Lorain County focused businesses and organizations.

To improve the quality of life in Lorain County by improving the local sense of community, by helping businesses to grow in the new economy, by providing employment in an innovative and exciting environment and returning a fair value to our stakeholders.

Beliefs

We believe that a strong sense of community is important and that the Internet medium can provide new avenues for building that sense of community in Lorain County.

We believe that the rules of the new economy are changing rapidly and that the Internet provides a way to embrace these changes and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

We believe in creating long-term sustainable relationships through listening, sharing, and being honest and ethical at all times.

We believe that by providing high quality at a fair price, our clients will receive the maximum value and we will receive the revenue and profit necessary to grow our business and support our clients over the long-term.

We believe in creating a work environment where people love their work, where teams and teamwork are emphasized and where individuals step-up to leadership roles based on their knowledge, experience and passion.

We believe that, in our industry, there is greater market value for intellectual property than physical property and will therefore strive to increase our value by learning from our successes and failures, by being open to new ideas, and by valuing the creative process.

History

Mike and Ed Skimin first registered the domain name LorainCounty.com in July 1996. Until March 1997, LorainCounty.com was a blank black screen on the Internet. In March 1997, Emerge, an Internet development firm co-owned by Mike and Ed, created a local search engine to link local Internet users to local web sites. This was intended to show Emerge's prospective customers what other companies were doing on the Internet. Page views in the site ranged from 1,000 to 3,000 per month during this period.

Between 1997 and 1998, Emerge slowly added features into LorainCounty.com to demonstrate Emerge's abilities, to increase the number of visitors to Emerge client's web sites and to increase the number of visitors into LorainCounty.com. These features included local weather, banner advertising, local feature stories, digital pictures and high school sports information. The added content and popularity of the site helped increase the monthly page views to between 10,000 and 30,000 per month in 1997 and 1998.

In early 1999, Emerge began a push to grow the number of sponsors and the quantity of content within LorainCounty.com. The push was only minimally successful but important lessons were learned including the need to grow the content of the site and increase the marketing of the web site. During 1999 the number of page views within the site grew from about 30,000 to 90,000 per month.

In 2000, LorainCounty.com LLC was created and LorainCounty.com was spun-off from Emerge. The site was redesigned, dramatically expanded and re-launched on September 21, 2000. The guiding philosophy was to create a local platform where the users of the site generated the majority of the content. The re-designed proved immensely popular as page views grew to over 240,000 per month by the end of 2000.

During 2001 and 2002, LorainCounty.com continued its growth in content, page views, number of users and sponsorship. The number of users to the LorainCounty.com grew to over 30,000 per month and page views reached over 640,000 per month and over 5.8 million in 2002.

A major redesign was launched on February 12, 2003. From 2003 to 2006, LorainCounty.com grew to over 45,000 user visiting over 2,500,000 pages each month.

On September 14, 2006, LorainCounty.com was upgraded to its current design.