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Podcast #21 – Stats, Stats, Stats
It’s January 2nd, 2012 and we’re back from a great year-end break.
Hopefully, you’ve noticed our new digs. And our new domain! If you have us bookmarked at our old domain, betteruserexperience.wordpress.com, now we’re at abetteruserexperience.com. And that’s that.
Before we dig into the meat in the podcast, I want to point out this video from whiskey maker Jura. I thought of this video today while tweeting with Patrick Neeman from usabilitycounts.com and also the DM for the UX Drinking Game. It’s the best company web video I’ve ever seen from a non-Internet company. There’s something about that guy that makes you really want to hang out with him.
On today’s podcast we’re getting back to UX basics.
We noticed that redesigning your site can make a huge immediate difference in how people use your site. When we were on wordpress.com we used a free blog theme. Their selection was limited and while our old theme wasn’t perfect, it worked for our purposes. From August through December, we grew our traffic steadily.
One of the dirty little secrets about wordpress.com hosted blogs is that they will not let you use Google Analytics. Instead they have their own version of analytics that essentially distills everything into pageviews. This is our chart of monthly pageviews from August-December.
It’s a nice looking chart that tops out at 1,622 pageviews, better than double the previous month’s traffic of 787 views.
In the 39 hours since we’ve implemented the new design, we’ve had 206 visits and 796 pageviews. To put that in perspective, that’s 50% of December’s traffic in 1/50th the time.
We don’t know for sure the number of visitors on the wordpress.com site and as a result we can’t know the number of pages-per-visit. However, my gut feeling is that we averaged about 1.5 pages-per-visit in 2011. That number has better than doubled to 3.85 pages-per-visit, a healthy increase.
The most telling thing I’ve seen in Google Analytics so far is what constitutes our top content. The number 1 most trafficked page on the site, even moreso than the homepage, is the UX Basics page.
And here we thought we were alone in wanting to know the basics. Instead, we’re all in this boat together!
And that got us to thinking: we should really hone in on UX basics over the next 3 months.
In today’s podcast, we talk about how to do that and what we’re going to cover. We talk more about the new web stats for abetteruserexperience.com and much more.
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Podcast Links
Here are a handful of links that we reference during the show.
Guitar Hero II: Lamb of God – Laid to Rest: Expert – 5 Stars
