Win or lose, Calgary Flames hockey fans are flocking to a rookie Web site where they can check out the scores and check in with other fans.

Calgarypuck.com is getting up to 24,000 hits a day — success that is even surprising the site’s co-publishers.

“Those are solid numbers for where we are,” says calgarypuck publisher Mike Board.

“We were getting 10 page views a day when we started. I would have said I’d be happy if we had 10,000 hits a day at this point.”

The site, launched about a year ago, is devoted to the Flames and their fans.

A merger between a sports reporting site and the “fire-and-ice” message board, calgarypuck is in the crease — waiting to score big with a format fans may not find anywhere else.

“I think we’re pretty unique in being a site that covers the team as a newspaper, but also a drop-in centre for fans,” explains co-publisher Darcy McGrath.

For McGrath and Board, a former Calgary Herald sports writer, getting on the Net was no small challenge.

Neither had much of a technical background, but both saw the opportunity the Internet offered.

“I was a rookie when I jumped in,” admits Board. “I didn’t know much — I knew how to surf the Net, but not how to put stuff on the Net.”

That was one of the reasons the writers decided to launch their site through rivals.com

The Seattle-based company looks after the startup fees and handles the back-end technology, marketing and advertising for media publishers like Board and McGrath.

“Rivals enables them to do what they do best — report the news,” says Rivals senior vice-president David Eckoff.

“I had to teach one of my clients how to turn his computer on and in a couple of days, he was up and running a site.”

Rivals maintains Web publishers do not have to know anything about HTML or engineering to run a site.

At the same time, the still-private company claims the more you know, the more unique your site can be.

Describing the Rivals template as a “blank canvas you just drop HTML into,” McGrath says both he and Board had to learn the language.

“But you just pick it up — trial and error, and you keep going,” he explains.

“It took me a long time to get a story coded right at first,” Board says.

“There were some pretty bizarre looking things on our page at first. But once you get used to it, once you learn it, it becomes second nature.”

The calgarypuck Web site is now one of the highest-ranking of Rivals’ 25 NHL team sites. According to those who monitor the pages, the number of hits a site gets has nothing to do with how well the team is doing.

“The bottom line is the quality of the site and the work that has been put into it,” explains Rivals hockey editor Daniel David.

“Mike and Darcy have done an incredible job building their site up in terms of traffic.”

Even so, the two men say they are still making very little money — less than $100 a month. The publishers get a portion of ad revenue, loosely based on how many visit their site. While site visits may be up at calgarypuck, the publishers say profits seem to be the same.

“The Internet right now is an ugly place to be,” says McGrath. “Lots of dot-coms are gone and advertising sales are down. It’s not a gold mine anymore.”

Rivals is quick to point out lagging sales are an even bigger obstacle for those who try to set up Web sites on their own.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible . . . to go out there on your own and make a go of it,” Eckoff says.

“You can have a site, but to make money is a different story.”

To diversify their revenue stream, calgarypuck’s publishers are looking at cutting their own deals in the Calgary market in the coming year. The site may also expand to include the Calgary Hitmen, university and minor hockey.

Board and McGrath are already each spending an average of two to three hours a day on their site, in addition to their day jobs. However, both feel it is time well spent for an Internet rebound that could be just around the corner.

“The boom was too much of a boom and when it went to bust, it really busted,” McGrath asserts.

“But you ask yourself, what’s more ‘in’ than the Internet — it’s going to be the place to be.”

“If we grow this, it can be very lucrative,” Board says. “We joke about it and say two years from now this could be all we do.”

Web Watch:
www.calgarypuck.com