14ers.com - About

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Looking for photos of Colorado's highest peaks? You've come to the right place - 14ers.com has over 20,000 photos of the Fourteeners (14ers). Need a route description to help you climb one of these great peaks? They are here too. Each route contains detailed directions, maps, satellite photo, elevation profile, and photos taken during an ascent. It's an On-line 14er Guidebook that is frequently updated. Look for new additions to the site on the What's New page, and for even more information, try the 14ers.com Forum.

The purpose of 14ers.com is to provide photos, routes, peak information, and an open forum without membership fees or competition. Open and free. It's those two words that draw a huge amount of people to the site. During the summer, 14ers.com often receives over 1,300,000 hits and 15,000+ unique visitors each day (View current volume statistics). With a combination of a large server and high-bandwidth OC48 data communication lines, you shouldn't have trouble getting information from the site. But there are times when the traffic is so massive, areas like the forum may slow temporarily. Based on the volume, it's no wonder that 14ers.com is the most popular Colorado 14er site.

14ers.com is not about competition, ranking of it's members, or limiting access to a specific type of user. It's about providing a simple interface to anyone interested in the 14ers. The site is dedicated to the 14ers, so you won't have to sift through tons of information to find what you're looking for. Enjoy.

Bill Middlebrook
Breckenridge, Colorado

What keeps 14ers.com Alive?
For the first few years, I used my own money to grow the site. It wasn't a big deal back then because there weren't thousands of people using it each day. In 2003, I was dramatically increasing the content which brought many users to the site. So, I had to start asking for donations to pay for web hosting and software costs related to site expansion. By 2004, there were thousands of people using 14ers.com each day and donations were covering about 1/3 of the costs related to the site.

Between 2005 and 2006, I added the forum and we were up to about 7,000 unique users per day on the site. With the increased number of users, I was able to get enough donations to cover over 1/2 of the site costs during this period. In 2007, the traffic doubled to over 10,000 unique users a day. I knew that donations weren't going to be enough to offset the large monthly site costs, so I added the 14ers.com store. T-shirts were the major item in the store and they began to bring in more money than donations.

By adding the store, I was able to cover all of the site costs for 2007. This was a big deal and it was good to stop sinking my own money into the site. Once the site started paying for itself, I made some large-scale system upgrades (larger, dedicated server) so the site could handle the continued expansion. In 2008, I added synthetic (Patagonia Capilene) shirts to the 14ers.com store. Between the store and donations, I'm confident we can continue to grow the site and provide an open environment without membership fees.

So, your Donations and purchases in the 14ers.com Store DO keep this site alive and help expand the content.