BikeBiz becomes a dotcom

BikeBiz.co.uk has long been visited by an international audience. Bike guru Gary Fisher has the site bookmarked and so do many other top bike trade execs from around the world.

This site is first and foremost a UK-site but we live in a global village and what makes the news in Milton Keynes could also have resonance in Hong Kong or San Francisco. Butterfly flaps its wings in China, storm is caused in Alaska, all that kind of stuff.

Over time, chunks of the site will migrate over to BikeBiz.com but for now, the stories and features will continue to have co.uk URLs. Typing www.bikebiz.com into your browser will transfer you to the co.uk site, just as www.bicyclebusiness.co.uk has always done.

Now then, what’s with that Hitwise claim? BikeBiz.co.uk a big site? Yep, even though it’s primarily B2B and password-protected, there are parts of the site that are public access and visited by scary-big numbers of web-surfers. The stats section, the online B3 address directory and the jobs board are all public access.

Want to know how well the jobs board works? Earlier this week, Country Lanes placed an exec-level job ad and got its first application within 17 minutes.

BikeBiz.co.uk regularly gets more visitors than sites you’d think would be much, much more popular. In January, BikeBiz.co.uk was only bested by Bikemagic.com and Singletrackworld.com. And that’s according to Hitwise, acknowledged by tech experts to be a pretty damn accurate visitor measuring service.

And now BikeBiz is a dotcom the site’s growth will accelerate, partly because it will be easier for international visitors to find (co.uk is not a terribly exciting suffix) and also because it’s now worth splashing some cash on the site’s promotion, on- and off-line.

So, welcome to the first day of BikeBiz.com…