Lies, Damn Lies and Web Statistics

Well, lets get the lies out of the way first; I'm a self made millionaire and I live in a castle on my own island in the Pacific. Right that's done, on with the point of the post!

Needless to say, I monitor the WebWideWord website to see how many visitors I get. I've been trying various ways and means of increasing my visitors which seems to vary between 30 and 50 per day (yes, to be honest I am a little disappointed in this but a long way from giving up). One of the methods I used was to Stumble my own site (just the once!) using StumbleUpon and a couple of friends also gave the thumbs up to the site.

I picked up a sprinkling of visitors from this means (5-10 per day) until last Friday. Suddenly I had 299 visits on Friday followed by just under 700 on Saturday. "Whoopee!" I thought until I looked at the number of words being added.

On Saturday from nearly 700 hits I had 4 words added. Compare this to the previous weekend when from a meagre 32 hits I had 13 words added. Friday was little better; 6 words from 299 visits.

My conclusion to this is that whilst StumbleUpon may have generated a large number of hits for me they were of little use in the grand scheme of things. I often spend an hour or so just Stumbling sites. Sometimes I read them, other times I quickly pass through. I suspect I had been hit by the latter. Low attention span, possibly, not a big enough indication on the start page saying what the point of the grid is, again possibly.

Anyway, my hits are back down to the 30-50 per day range.

I await with interest what happens next time StumbleUpon passes my way.

Remember though Spread the WebWideWord.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The site this week really has been a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly (hence the title of the entry).

The Good

There's been some wonderful feedback to the site both from the perspective of the idea and the technical implementation. This feedback is much appreciated and helps me through the parts where the Bad kicks in. One person's feedback suggested that I also allow the user to enter tags against the word and create a tag board showing the most popular tags. My first though was that this idea has been done to death but I'm coming rund to thinking about it in a more positive vein. The only problem is the people who've entered words so far. I guess I'll just have to go through and try and create tags for them. Anyway, many thanks to all those people who have given me some nice feedback (kelfy and erikko on the BloggerForum for example).

The Bad

No, not bad feedback, I always look upon this constructively anyway but to be honest (apart from the Ugly section) all feedback has been positive. The bad is the disappointing number of hits the site is getting. It seems to pick up and then drops back down again. I'll not claim large number of hits; my best day is just short of 100 but yesterday was a poor 18! I'm hoping for 1000/day by Christmas but it's not looking likely.

The Ugly

I've received two comments about the wonderful (not) site logo. I make no apologies for this. I am a software developer. My art gene has gone missing, rather it was never there. I, cheekily, asked on the about if anyone could provide me with a neat logo but as of yet no takers. I'm going to have to look into getting something better but trust me, a text logo is far better than anything I could produce myself.

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Remember Spread the WebWideWord

WebWideWord - Yet More Updates

It's been a busy night tonight.

I've modified the loading of the grid so that it too is done via Ajax. This means that the grid is now sized according to the amount of space within the browser window. There is a maximum size, otherwise things slowed down a bit too much.

Resizing the window doesn't resize the grid, yet! I started to look at this but couldn't find any reliable cross-browser resize event handling code. I had it working a treat in Firefox but IE and Opera just wouldn't play the game :(

It's been a bit of a disappointing day today, only 4 new words added - the worst day for a week!

WebWideWord - New Updates

Some minor updates to the WebWideWord came over the weekend. These are: -

• Display the link associated with the word in the tooltip box.
  I was planning on displaying this in the browser status bar until I discovered that this isn't accessible in Javascript within IE7 with the default security settings. Someone asked for the URL to be shown as they were cautious to click on a link when they had no idea where it may take them.
  
• New headline messages
  I've added three new headline messages to the page. These are to indicate how long it is since a word was clicked, what the last word clicked was and the character dimensions of the word grid (Thanks to Andrew for the last suggestion).
  
• Sponsor Links
  The site now has two sponsors.
  These are FlightSimX (http://www.flightsimx.co.uk/) which is a wonderful resource for those of you who are interested in flight simulators and MJ Artworks (http://www.mjartworks.co.uk/) who can provide, from a photograph, a hand drawn pencil portrait of your pet.
  Thanks to both for your support.

One problem that has been highlighted is that the word grid is a fixed size. I intend to look at generating the grid in a size that will fit into the browser window space that is available. I will also aim to make it resize if the browser window itself is resized.

Watch this space .....

..... and remember "Spread the WebWideWord"

Web Wide What?

Over the last couple of days I have been thinking that the domain name WebWideWord is perhaps not as good as I originally thought.

When I came up with the name and saw that it was free I though it was ideal. A play on the term "World Wide Web" but switched to mean a word grid that was as wide as the web, what could be better? Easily remembered! Quite a fun name!

The problem is that it is too much like World Wide Web, a phrase that just rolls off the tongue for many people. So far I have had the site referred to as

• WebWideWord (The correct one - well done to those who use this one)
• WordWideWeb - (I include myself in this one and even posted on a forum with this as the link, Ooops)
• WorldWideWord

I'm tempted to email the owners of the other two domains (Yes! they both exist) to ask if their traffic has increased over the last couple of weeks. I'd also be interested to hear if they have experienced the same problems over confusion with the domain name.

So, remember it's www.webwideword.com, the WebWideWord.

First 100 Reached! Here's to the next

Well we finally did it today. We made 100 words on the WebWideWord. The 100th word was DigitalGroup which linked to the website at http://www.digitalrays.blogspot.com.

Whilst I was hoping for more words than 100 after three weeks live I have learned a lot about website promotion. Firstly it's tough! There is so much out there, how on earth do you get people to visit your site.

On we go, I am still aiming for 1000 words by Christmas. So come on, make my Christmas - come and post your word on the WebWideWord, if you've already posted one, post another. Come and see what words other people have posted. Some of the links from them are very interesting. My favourite so far is http://samwoodfin.typepad.com/ although I'm slightly biased because he, very kindly, gave me a mention on his blog.

Another Weekend Over ....

.... and I've not reached the target of 100 words on the site :(

I posted a link on a fellow IT contractor's forum on Friday and thought that it may generate a few words. It did, unfortunately, most of them had to be deleted due to the unsuitability!

I believe that most people assume that the unsuitable, vulgar posts on the net are from teenagers. I'm not so sure. I believe that they are widespread across the whole spectrum of internet users.

Anyway, 41 words (lots added by me). I need to think how I can generate more visitors to the site. Ho hum.