Of all our specialty Web sites on www.HonoluluAdvertiser.com, the runaway success of www.HawaiiWarriorBeat.com has surprised us all.

The site, which takes all of our University of Hawai'i sports content — stories, photos, blogs, videos, rosters, schedules and polls — and puts them in one place, debuted Aug. 29, just three days before the UH football team opened its season. In those three days, the site logged 35,629 page views.

We had expected 200,000 to 300,000 monthly page views, but now the numbers are in for September and the site has drawn 544,553 page hits and 127,811 monthly unique visitors. Add Stephen Tsai's popular blog, The Warrior Beat, and his 422,781 hits (a monthly record for any of our blogs) and the newly created site has nearly 1 million page views in its first full month.

Much of the credit goes to Tsai, who noticed the proliferation of our microsites, such as www.HawaiiPreps.com and www.HawaiiMoms.com and figured that a site devoted to UH sports would be popular. As well as HawaiiPreps and HawaiiMoms are doing, HawaiiWarriorBeat in its first month is getting nearly twice the hits of our high school site and nearly four times what our moms site is getting. It gets more viewership than even our local online news page.

With the University of Hawai'i football team primed for its best season ever, Tsai put together a plan that included all the elements of the site, including a special section for Heisman Trophy candidate Colt Brennan and video rosters in which members of the Warriors introduce themselves.

Sandee Oshiro, the managing editor for digital and multimedia, convened a group that included Sports Editor Curtis Murayama and representatives from online, advertising and marketing. The group worked swiftly and while putting together a site usually takes much longer, www.HawaiiWarriorBeat.com was conceived and launched in just two months.

Murayama was also juggling a bushel of other tasks: putting together the UH football special section, monitoring a revamped Pigskin Picks contest, relaunching our prep sports page six days a week and keeping the preps site fresh, not to mention overseeing the rest of our daily and Sunday content. He was also busy increasing our online breaking sports postings, including updated scores of each UH football game during the game.

But Murayama knew from the start that this was a can't-miss site.

"I believe that this had all the special elements to be a hit in its first year: Momentum built from the success of last year's team, the return of a star quarterback with a Heisman Trophy resume, an extremely popular blog on UH sports, a fan base that craves for football and other UH sports, and the added impact of photo galleries and videos from practice, games and postgame interviews," he said.

"We believe we're the leading news source now because our videos go up before TV and our postgame press conferences are unedited, so nothing's taken out of context," he said.

I applaud Murayama, Tsai and the others who worked on the site. Once they got approval, they worked quietly and quickly to make it happen. Tsai, who has been a stalwart member of the staff for years covering University of Hawai'i football in print, has expanded his role nicely into the online world.

He's even got his own fan club and believe it or not, those "Tsaikos" have their own Web site. (Go to www.Tsaikos.com.)

www.HawaiiWarriorBeat.com is full of information about the football team and the women's volleyball team right now but as the other seasons begin, we'll expand our coverage of men's volleyball, basketball and baseball, plus women's basketball and softball.

Make sure to check back to get the latest and most comprehensive information anywhere on UH sports.