Odometer rolls-over 500K

SUBHEAD: Our www.IslandBreath.org rolled over 500,000 page hits.

By Juan Wilson on 13 December 2008 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2008/12/odometer-reads-500000-hits.html)

 


MILESTONE
Overnight the IslandBreath.org website passed a milestone. Our visitor counter that, looks like a car odometer, down at the bottom of the front page, rolled over the 500,000 page hits to the website.


THE PAST For two years we have been tracking visits to out site with free software code from http://www.statcounter.com/ . It is a comprehensive and useful service. The graphic above is a an area graph over-laying the daily frequency of three kinds of hits on our site. One kind (the most frequent) are individual pages of the website arrived at (in green). Another kind is the number of unique visitors have arrived at the site (in blue) and lastly are the number of repeat visitors to the site.

Overall the numbers have been on steady climb over the time we have tracked the site. In January of 2006 we were averaging about 15 pages hits a day. By the end of that year the average was close to 200 pages. For the first have of 2007 we averaged about 350 page hits a day. But then came the Superferry.

Between August 26 and September 19 we averaged over 1000 page hits a day.

Two of those days had record breaking days near 2000 hits. For much of 2008 the site had had a rhythmic cycle with a peak early in the week and a trough around the weekend. In the last month we have averaged about 800 hits a day with about 75 returning daily customers, and about 500 new visitors. The average duration of about a quarter of the visitors is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. About an eight of all visitors lingered from five minutes to over an hour. Our editors now include Juan Wilson, Linda Pascatore, Jonathan Jay and David Ward. Of course, all this is history and water under the bridge.  

THE FUTURE
On January 1st 2009 our website will be five years old. For the last month I have been working to restructure the website for a new set of features such as RSS feeds, subscriptions, commenting and more. We briefly used some of this technology in 2007 during the height of the Superferry controversy.

We used a parallel blogsite for comments and directed visitors between both sites. It was neither a good blogging environment or a fully featured website. We are trying to meld the two this January. An experimental website is now paralleling the original. As of the end of this year the new website will replace the old.

The domain name "www.islandbreath.org" will no longer point to "http://homepage.mac.com/juanwilson/islandbreath/".

It will instead point to the new home with "http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/" nested inside. The entire archive of 2004-2008 will be available there, either though internal menus or google searches. We are still working on details. That means testing comments, color schemes, printing formats, etc. We had to lose some good old features to get to the new ones.

We will try to incorporate your suggestions as we go. We are formatting the new website to be printable as a weekly magazine. Take a visit and tell us what you think. Keep in mind that the "official" site is still the old one. Things may come and go at the new one until January 2009 as we work on it.