A year ago today, Greenoptions.com went live to the public for the first time. Jeff remembers those first exciting hours of our launch, but I trace the most important moments back to the start of a parallel timeline.

In the early days of our little startup, it was sometimes hard to tell exactly where we were going. We knew that Treehugger had built a successful content model by catering to the significant number of people who self-identify with that term. We wondered if it was possible to do the same, but with a brand and content focus that would help draw ordinary people towards a more conscious mindset, by meeting them where they are.

With that in mind and no funding secured, I attended the 2006 SF Green Festival as just another festival-goer, passing out user surveys to help nail down our demographics. Without a booth, I was quickly asked to stop or leave, but I vowed to be back next year, with both a booth and a greater sense of purpose.

The intervening year was one of constant development. We launched GO 1.0 in February, added Planetsave.com to our portfolio in June, launched a redesigned homepage in July (thanks to Noel of eight6.com for all of his great work), and set plans in motion to build the next major iteration of the Green Options content model through the Fall.

On of the big lessons of our first eight months was that while there are some people who want all the green info they can handle in one single site (ala Treehugger and many of the green-themed sites that pop up daily), that just isn’t the way most people get involved in sustainability. Real, busy, normal people tend to become engaged when one ‘green’ issue strikes close to home, and don’t want to be bothered by everything else until they’ve had a good experience ‘testing the waters’ with that issue.

Although our writers covered their areas of expertise brilliantly from day one, we needed to build on our content model to help them get a foot in the door of an audience broader than that which green online media has traditionally reached. Noel and our self-proclaimed bit-herder, Chris, whipped up (on an astounding deadline) the technical infrastructure to build a network of blogs, both home-grown and imported, that would allow our team to focus on making particular issues accessible to a more mainstream audience through discrete channels.

By November 2007, I was back at the Green Festival in SF, with a booth (as I had promised a year earlier), and an amazing team (which I could not have imagined a year earlier). Greenfest marked the first public display of Green Options Media, and the first three sites of the new network. At the same time, we re-engineered GreenOptions.com as community portal. To date, we’ve focused on building out the network of blogs, but we have good things planned in addition to user journals.

So, what does the future hold?

Since mid-2007, we’ve had a hardcore programmer with a finance degree building a simple web app that gives people the power to assess the feasibility of solar panels for their own home, and then turn that assessment into bids from installers. It’s in private beta, and will be launching to the public when the sun comes out this spring.

In the meantime, GO Media will be expanding on its current stable of 10 properties. We’ll be releasing our take on a green technology blog and a good ol’ local American counterpart to our popular international green news report, EcoWorldly, and we have a few other cool features in the pipe as well.

Essentially, we’ve created a playground for our writers. These are the people on the ground in the environmental movement. Our writers are composed of green professionals who are out to find practical solutions. We know that environmentalism is a complex game; I’m not the only staff member who has family members who are coal miners.

But the more you read, the more our writers dig into the topics they live and breathe anyway; we just provide the platform to increase the amount of information in the market, direct from the people who are closest to the issues that matter.

The past year has flown, and we’re excited about the ones to come. Thank you for being here, and being a part of the first chapter of the Green Options story.