Cameron Olthuis

5ones is a project that first began last July. It all started when I met Chris Bennett from 97th Floor at last year’s SMX Advanced. We quickly hit it off, partly because we both share a deep passion for surfing and other action sports. We talked a lot about how the action sports industry is pretty lame when it comes to the web. For an industry that’s generally pretty forward thinking, it’s amazing how many years behind they are with this online stuff. After the conference we kept talking about projects that we could work together on in this space and eventually we settled on 5ones.

What exactly is it? 5ones is an action sports news and information site covering surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and other industry happenings. Right now what you see on the site is just a small taste of what’s to come in the future.

Although technically started last July, due to both of our busy schedules it didn’t take long before the site was placed on the back burner, as neither of us could find the time to keep it regularly updated and give the TLC it needed. It’s around this time that I started to realize I was taking on too much client work and I needed to slow down or I’d never have time to focus and build out my empire. So that’s what I did, I started to make the time and refocus on doing this thing proper.

Fast forward to Jan ‘08. I hired a couple writers, gave myself the position of Editor in Chief, and started pumping out regular content again. Although we originally launched the site back in July ‘07, we feel that we didn’t really start the site until the first of this year. Since then we’ve been keeping the site updated regularly. We just finished the redesign and now we’re launching what we call version 1.0. I must say that I am very impressed with the design, which was done by Pat Bennett from Modern Web Design. I would highly recommend using Pat for design work as you can see he did a fabulous job with 5ones. He also did all the custom WP hacks/programming.

One of the questions I get a lot is - what’s the meaning behind the name? To be honest, there isn’t one. As most of you know, finding domain names is pretty damn hard these days, most everything we wanted was taken so we just brainstormed, that name came up, and it stuck. I wish I had a good story about how the name came about but I don’t.

5ones is the first of many projects that I’ll be releasing through Factive over the next year. It’s a joint project in partnership with 97th Floor, who will also be involved in one other Factive property that is expected to launch this summer.

I also want to give a shout out to the wonderful staff of writers we have on the team. I am very pleased with their work and their desire to step it up and progress with the site. We have had tremendous success with traffic and growing our audience in just a few short months and much of that is because of the quality of content our writers have produced.