King James Bible Website Celebrates 3 Million Visits and 400th Anniversary of King James Version

1612-1613 King James Bible Cover

Longview, WA -- King James Bible Online (www.kingjamesbibleonline.org), a website inviting its visitors to read the Bible online, celebrates three million visits since being founded in November 2007. This milestone coincides with the 400 year anniversary of the King James Version, first published in 1611 in England under the direction of King James I.

The 3-year-old website is three years old and is prepared for an increase in web traffic during the month of May as organizations around the world are hosting 400-year anniversary conferences and lectures about the King James Bible. The King James Bible Expo 2011 held in Washington D.C. is one of the events and is scheduled for May 2-3.

"With these 400-year anniversary events and special news coverage, more people are searching the Web for the King James Bible than ever before," said Trent Mueller, the website's owner. "It just happens that this website ranks well in search engines for the phrase 'King James Bible' and may be the only site with all 80 books of the original 1611 King James Bible as searchable text."

According to Google Analytics, a service which measures web traffic statistics, the website's three million total visits consisted of 1.5 million unique visitors accessing the site approximately two times each and viewing an average of 5.7 pages per visit, or 17 million total pages. Search engine traffic accounted for 78% of the website's visits. "We've never done any paid advertising," said Mueller.

The King James Bible Online website has a dedicated section with 400-year-anniversary resources, including history, videos, timelines, articles, facts, and quotes.

The website's most popular feature is Bible trivia, which is integrated into the Bible reading. "Users may read a chapter of the Bible and take a quiz about what they read. It's both fun and educational," said Mueller.

The King James Bible was the first English Bible to be printed in the United States, and more than 1 billion copies have been published worldwide to date. In the bill Recognizing the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible, introduced April 12th in the U.S. House of Representatives, the King James Bible is noted as the most widely printed and distributed work in history.

During King James I's reign from 1603 A.D. to 1625 A.D., he commissioned an English translation of the Bible from a committee of fifty-four translators. This significant undertaking produced the "Authorized Version," in 1611, later known as the "King James Bible." James intended for the Authorized Version to replace the popular Geneva translation, although it took some time for its influence to take hold.

The large folio book of the King James Bible also contained a variety of informational materials, including a note on the translation, a map of the Holy Land, a full calendar of the church year, and an extensive genealogical chart from Adam and Eve to Christ.

First printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, this was the third official translation into English; the first having been the "Great Bible" commissioned by the Church of England in the reign of King Henry VIII, and the second having been the Bishop's Bible of 1568. King James I of England held a meeting in January 1604 at Hampton Court, where the idea of making a new English version was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church of England.

Published May 3, 2011