By Mark Evans

Paula Gignac has two overriding passions in her life: her job as head of Chatelaine.com and the sport of surfing (the water variety). She also believes the two pursuits share many characteristics: both in the water and on the ‘net, the wave you catch will either take you for a remarkable ride or wipe you out.

“You see the wave and you have to feel when it’s time to jump up and go for that ride,” she explained during an interview a few days before flying off for a week of surfing in Hawaii. “Whether it’s surfing or the Web, there’s a lot of stuff underneath the surface and you don’t know what will come up.”

For Gignac, one thing coming up is Chatelaine.com’s reputation as one of Canada’s most popular and innovative sites. According to consulting firm Jupiter Media Metrix, the site attracts more than 250,000 unique users a month, generating more than three million page views. That audience puts Canada’s Chatelaine.com in the same league as prominent American rivals such as iVillage.com and Oxygen.com.

And far from retrenching, as many dot-coms are doing, Chatelaine.com is aggressively expanding. In the past year, the number of employees has jumped eightfold to 16. The larger staff means the site has the sales, marketing and technical muscle to cement its market foothold and work on driving off rivals, including Montreal-based Transcontinental Media’s MochaSofa.com, which opened its doors in May.

Not surprisingly, the atmosphere around the Chatelaine.com offices, located on the same floor as the parent magazine’s editorial and sales units, is buoyant, confident and optimistic.

“We’re zigging when everyone else is zagging,” Gignac said. “I know the model will work because we’re very conservative. We went slow and have developed the Web site according to the market, not ahead of the market.”

With so many new people on board, Gignac plays a multifaceted role: strategic guru, site evangelist, technical expert, cheerleader and super-sales-person. During staff meetings, Gignac sits at her desk browsing through Chatelaine.com’s site while employees talk about new programs and ideas. In many ways, this symbolizes herfocus on the site’s users-keeping in mind what they want and will use.

“Paula is one hell of a driven woman,” said Chatelaine publisher Donna Clark, who has encouraged the Web site’s growth. “She has the drive, personality, dedication and passion for the brand to succeed. She has leadership abilities and understands the way the Web works and, more importantly, what makes Chatelaine successful.”

Profit pressures
Chatelaine.com has adopted its bullish, gung-ho approach despite the closure of Springboard.ca, another site aimed primarily at women. On the drawing board for more than a year at Rogers Media, Springboard shut its doors less than two months after its launch. The failure was attributed to the dot-com downturn and the cost of building a brand name from scratch.

Springboard’s demise has clearly had an impact at Chatelaine, given Rogers Media’s decision to pour additional money into Chatelaine.com. The pressure from management to produce better results and profits looms in the background.

“There is intense pressure. Everyone is very nervous up there [at Rogers Media],” said Gignac, who expects Chatelaine.com to be profitable by 2003.

She adds that being under the financial spotlight forces her to operate smarter. Many dot-coms, she said, had far too much venture capital for their own good and never experienced financial restraint. As a result, too many blew up after over-hiring and over-spending on marketing. That is clearly not happening at Chatelaine.com, whichhas none of the dot-com accoutrements-ping-pong tables, cappuccino machines-that were standard equipment not long ago.

Ground floor
Gignac’s path to Chatelaine.com was, if anything, circuitous. After studying wildlife biology at university, she spent three years working with wolves and seals. Looking for something more creative, Gignac studied photography for three years. Then, in 1994, she discovered the Internet.

“I saw the wave coming,” she said. “I saw it as a chance to get in front of everybody and be on the forefront of something for the next 20 years.”

To get up to speed, Gignac took a seven-month course at Digital Media Studio in Toronto, and completed interface work on several Web sites.

Gignac got the job at Chatelaine.com by way of being in the right place at the right time. It was 1996 and she was working the graveyard shift as a technical support advisor at Internet service provider Interlog Internet. That’s when she came across an email message that Chatelaine sent to Kelly Peters, president of Webgrrls Canada, asking for her advice on a job description for a manager of Chatelaine.com. Taking it for a job posting, Gignac fired off her resume.Two days later, she got the job.

Although Chatelaine was supportive of the Web site, Chatelaine.com operated on a shoestring budget for the first three years. When Gignac wanted to create fitness training videos as part of a new health section, Gignac rented the lights, hired models and filmed the one-day shoot herself. It helped that she had filmmaking experience: in 1994, she co-created Excess is What I Came For, a documentary about Toronto’s colourful Boom Boom Room nightclub.

Pushing brand
For the first three and a half years, Gignac and designer Pamela Chan ran Chatelaine.com as a two-woman shop. Gignac provided the strategic and technical vision, and acted as the Web and technical specialist within Chatelaine-doing everything from convincing salespeople of the Web’s potential to showing writers how to surf the Web.

Rather than simply turning Chatelaine.com into a digital version of the magazine, Gignac fashioned the site into an interactive medium that extended the magazine’s brand and encouraged readers to become part of an online community.

A key factor to early success was the inclusion of features that surfers could easily use-no small feat given that the Web was just emerging as a mainstream tool. One of the most popular features was the newsgroups section, which let the site’s readers exchange ideas and engage in virtual conversation on a variety of topics. Chatelaine.com also offered readers easy access to its archived articles and a list of suggested Web sites that catered to their interests.

As Chatelaine.com and the Web evolved, Gignac said the site has been able to offer more sophisticated features and content. The newsgroups are still popular, and they now require a full-time editor to oversee the section, while the magazine’s archived articles and recipe files also attract a lot of traffic. Gignac said the site broke new ground this fall by offering a “Thanksgiving Made Easy” section that let people learn by viewing four RealPlayer streaming videos.

Chatelaine.com’s evolution from the magazine’s little sister to an important editorial, marketing and business entity took shape after Donna Clark was named the magazine’s publisher in 1998. Clark had a big mandate: a total overhaul of the 69-year-old magazine to attract a younger audience and boost its sagging readership. Much to Clark’s surprise, Chatelaine.com played a key role in galvanizing the magazine’s new direction. Unlike the magazine, which gave its aging readers features such as knitting patterns, Chatelaine.com was funkier, hipper and appealed to the 25- to 49-year-old audience the magazine wanted.

“We realized within the magazine that the Web site was a small part of the franchise, but we didn’t realize its power until we went through the re-launch,” Clark said.

Bill Sweetman, vice-president of interactivity with Toronto-based Web consulting firm Delvinia, said Gignac has established Chatelaine.com as the standard to beat in terms of moving a print publication online.

“To this day I run across publishers here and in the U.S.who are thinking about doing things that Chatelaine has already done and proved to work, or already done and proved not to work.”

Sweetman believes Gignac’s success has much to do with her ability to combine a techie’s enthusiasm for the Web with a pragmatic business approach. “She is beating the drums every day convincing the mainstream marketing person at a packaged goods company about the Web and making the light go on for him or her,” he said.

As Chatelaine.com breaks new ground and becomes a bigger business, Sweetman said Gignac has the potential to achieve much greater things within the Rogers empire. “What’s interesting is that others in the Rogers media portfolio are starting to realize those folks at Chatelaine.com are the ones to watch, and a lot of that is due to her.”