I dismissed doing a third anniversary column in July after grappling with decisions on the future direction of rrspin.com.

After a meeting Wednesday with Bob Agoglia and Curry Roberts of The Computer Guy and Company, I have a clearer idea of where we need to go.

One of the things that will be crucial is your help and support. That’s why you’ll see a donation box on the website in October and I would appreciate your help in donating what you see fit.

The donation box will be in lieu of outright charging for the website, something we have thought long and hard about. While projections show it would be a lucrative move even at $1 a month and solve the issue of moving the website to the next level, those projections are purely based on analytics and we decided it would hurt the website more than help, alienate advertisers and lose a great portion of the many readers we have gained.

There will be incentives worked out in the next few months to make giving more palatable and just because we have a donation box doesn’t mean we are going to stop selling ads. If anything it means we will try to sell more ads and possibly bring a second part time ad salesperson onboard.

Why are we asking you to help? The answer is simple — because we are ready to take this to the next level.

The next level in this case means having the funds to hire a full-time reporter so we can double and possibly triple the coverage that I have been doing by myself for the last three years.

Our numbers are strong and while the web traffic monitoring site compete.com shows our unique visitors to be 15,366, we actually know they are much higher than that and have entered the 20,000 range with total monthly visitors now hitting the 70,000 mark.

Sites such as compete.com can only give a rough estimate of traffic since they don’t and, will never, have access to our analytics so you have to view them with some skepticism and realize they are not completely accurate.

Even using skewed analytics is encouraging to us, as Agoglia pointed out during our meeting. It means in three years we have taken roughly 50 percent of the readers of the nearest competitor’s website.

So while the idea of charging is tempting, the prospect of losing readers even to a nominal fee makes it moot at this point.

What you will be seeing in the immediate future is the addition of at least one part time sports reporter, the addition of weddings and engagements and other society news and the addition of legal notices to our classified advertising section, which will remain free through the end of October. At the end of that period we will weigh what we need to charge and adjust to provide you the most affordable rates in the area.

We are also considering changing our structure but won’t make that move until consulting with an attorney.

There have already been some minor changes to the website to make your visit more pleasing but right now we are asking you to help support this website so we can go beyond what one person has been doing for the last three years — Lance Martin