Back To School…
In eight days’ time, I’ll be back at the school. The last year of high school.
I was recently reflecting on my first day at high school, in another state, and thinking how far away year 12 seemed to be. How quickly time goes.
Latest Entries
Doctype.tv
I just stumbled upon a really well made — almost Revison3-like in style — video podcast for web designers and developers called Doctype. It’s really worth watching if you’re looking to learn more about how to give your designs that extra edge.
Why The Numbers Don’t Matter
Are you addicted to checking your web site’s analytics? Stop it. Now.
I must admit that, when I used to run a mildly successful blogging forum (which I’m thinking of starting up again), I was addicted to checking the visitor stats. I needed to know every single visitor that visited which, for a small site, was a big thing. But then I learned if you’ve got your head stuck in the stats then they’re never going to increase.
Why? Because visitors don’t visit a site because it has 2.2 million monthly visitors, they visit because they can get something out of it. They visit because they can get an informative article, funny video or insightful infographic.
It’s More Than Content
Chris Coyier nailed this point in his recent article, “Increase Traffic by Reducing Traffic“. There are so many ways people can interact with your site without registering a ‘hit’, through APIs, RSS feeds, downloads and so on. But these interactions generate, in my opinion, two more important metrics – interest and respect. If people are interested in your site and its content and respect your opinion and knowledge then visitors will come naturally.
But Don’t Ignore The Stats
This article isn’t saying that statistics aren’t important. They are. As a site author you need to know who is visiting and what they are looking at in order to know what kind of content people respond to you. You also need to know what visitors are saying about you, which is why Twitter monitoring, for example, is becoming a growing market. Just don’t let the statistics consume you, don’t let them shape your site and your voice.
FriendFeed is a “new service”?
As I write this post, FriendFeed is currently “unavailable”, but I noticed something interesting on their Service Unavailable page:
That’s right, they call themselves a “new” service. I guess it attests to the service’s stability record that they haven’t had to think about this page for a long time.
Oops.
Well it seems I’ve managed to delete my whole site. I won’t give details because it will only show you just how much of an idiot I am.
It looks like I’m starting over on my blog, so watch this space, I guess.
