Happy Birthday, Geneva Patch!

I'm kicking myself right now.

I should have thrown a big party. Rented some space, served some champagne—in the spirit of the city's codes—invited some bigwigs and loyal Patch readers. A couple week's ago, I could have held a competition to see who could create the most interesting Geneva Patch birthday cake or draw the Patch emblem—like they do with the Google doodle or the sun on CBS Sunday Morning.

We could have had streamers and noise-makers! A la Dr. Seuss, we could have banged our Patch-pinkers and honked our Patch-wonkers.

We could have gone to a and had Ozzie throw out the first Patch pitch. might have followed, with a grand finale of exploding emerald Patch pyrotechnics.

And who wouldn't have loved a Patch ?

Unfortunately, I missed the deadline for all of these, as marketing finished a close second to site updates, meeting coverage and failed attempts at work-life balance.

Note to self: Next year, more marketing.

There's a ton of stuff I could have done better in the past 12 months, but there are some things we've done pretty well, too.

We built an audience, for starters.

When we began this shindig a year ago, our audience was zero. We had no marketing budget, and we were supposed to grow this audience, how? By word of mouth? I remember during the first couple weeks wondering if I was doing all this work and throwing it into the vast emptiness of cyberspace, never to be seen.

Then, miraculously, people tuned in. Ten, 50, 75 ... 100, 200, 400 ... 1,000, 2,000 ...

I keep waiting for the bubble to burst, like the , or for some plateau or saturation point, but we continue to grow unique visitors each month. We're on the path for our best month ever in August, and I'm told that, of the 900-plus Patch sites, Geneva is in the top 10 in ratio of UVs to population.

You can see the momentum growing. Geneva Patch is all of a sudden full of ads. We just introduced . There's a new school year coming, with all the potential for stories and audience participation. Geneva Patch is going to be the media sponsor for Pumpkins for a Cure (more on that in a future article), we've got a terrific group of bloggers, and we're adding to the group every day.

And the scary thing is that we're just a year old.

A reader sent me an e-mail a few weeks ago saying congratulations for becoming a "household word" in Geneva. I don't think we're there yet. In fact, I'm kicking myself right now because I know that we can do so much more. I know that we can add depth to the reporting, do more video and multimedia work, encourage more participation from PTOs and civic organizations, add more bloggers and local voices and make this the No. 1 source for news and information for my beloved home town, Geneva, IL.

The first year was fun.

The second year could be, should be, will be ...

Amazing.

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