Archive for the ‘Blog Statistics’ Category
by David Peralty on November 9th, 2006
It looks like four seconds is considered the average cut-off mark now for getting something readable on the screen of your visitors, before they stop waiting and move on, so optimizing your site is ever more important, even with the adoption of broadband around the world, you still need to make sure your site can be downloaded, and rendered in under that four second window, or who knows how many potential visitors your blog is loosing out on.
Akamai and JupiterResearch recently ran a study dealing with e-commerce sites to find this four second conclusion, but that does not mean that the statistic isn’t also useful to us blog operators.
Based on the feedback of 1,058 online shoppers that were surveyed during the first half of 2006, JupiterResearch offers the following analysis:
- The consequences for an online retailer whose site underperforms include diminished goodwill, negative brand perception, and, most important, significant loss in overall sales.
- Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers and those with greater tenure.
Like I mentioned, this translates over to bloggers as well, as we continue to add widgets, flash objects, multimedia, and call objects from other sites, like stats scripts and flickr photo streams. We have to realize that adding too much to our site takes away from the user experience. If I am on your blog, and it takes too long to load, I won’t care how great your content is.
And don’t think because you have the fastest DSL, Cable or Fibre to the home connection on the block that everyone has those kind of connection speeds.
Some quick tips include:
Optimize your images and image sizes. Lowering the quality of your images by ten, twenty, or even thirty percent can greatly reduce loading times, without really making a noticeable change of appearance.
Never use a Bitmap (BMP) on your site. (I know this seems like common sense to some, but I have seen it more than once.) Learn about JPG’s, GIF’s, and PNG’s.
Limit the amount of items you load from remote servers and services. If your site is to display the latest YouTube videos, I can’t help you, but do you really need your Flickr photo stream on every page? In WordPress a simple is_home() conditional statement will make it only appear on your index page.
Find ways to reduce the number of images you need. It is amazing what some fancy CSS and Javascript can do these days.
Only call for the scripts you need. If you are going to use Javascript for some fancy visual effect only on your about page, or photogallery, don’t include it in your header on the pages you are not going to use it. This is especially the rule for the index page of your site.
First impressions count, so what are you doing to better your users experience?
Categories: Blog Design, Blog Statistics
by David Peralty on November 6th, 2006
Tris Hussey talks about a post that Lee Oden wrote on RSS Readers.
Lee mentioned that his biggest RSS subscriber base was via e-mail. Not bloglines, or anything else, but e-mail. People still love that delivery system, and if they have an e-mail account, they don’t have to subscribe to another service. I like RSS to e-mail services as well. The idea that my grandma can get my weekly postings in her inbox to keep up with how I am doing delights both of us.
Bloglines, Pageflakes and Feedblitz are the top three for Tris, but he thinks that many people are still used to getting information in their inbox.
I use Bloglines for almost all of my subscriptions because my e-mail accounts are cluttered enough as it is. What do your users use to subscribe to your blogs? Also, what do you use?
Categories: Blog Statistics, Blogging Tips
by David Peralty on October 25th, 2006
Let me preface this by letting you know that I am Canadian and as such I have a sweetspot for blogging statistics for my own country.
Over on Canoe.ca, a popular news and information site, they have an article up that takes a look at the popularity of blogging in Canada, and while there are a fair bit of people reading blogs, percentage wise, we are not a big blo writing community.
According to the Environics Research Group, only seven per cent of all the people surveyed have written their own blogs while nine per cent claim they have posted a response to one in the timeframe studied.
Canadian youth appear to be spurring the blogging trend with 51 per cent stating they read blogs on a regular basis. That is more than twice the national average. Nearly one quarter (22 per cent) say they also write their own blogs.
It is interesting to see how low the adoption of writing in a blog is in Canada, and I would be interested to see how this compares to the rest of the world. I am amazed that around fifty-one percent of youner Canadians are reading blogs on a regular basis. That’s not just a geek community activity. I would be interested to see what people consider blogs though because if MySpace pages/blogs count, I hang my head in shame.
Categories: Blog Statistics
by David Peralty on October 16th, 2006
There have been many reports about the Google Sandbox over the ages of blogging, but recently Pearsonified has put up a great graphical look at leaving the Sandbox, and I thought the article deserved to be featured here.
It really is amazing how powerful Google is in terms of pushing traffic all over the Web. I have literally been wowed by the rate at which my traffic and other metrics have increased over the last two months, which is basically the time frame in which I crawled out of the Google sandbox.
When I first got into blogging, I had no idea that there was such a thing as the Google Sandbox, and for the most part, it remains a mystery to me why Google will allow certain sites out faster than others, or allow certain sites to bypass it all together. I understand its usefulness though, and it is something that should always be taken into consideration when embarking on any site, be it a blog or otherwise.
Categories: Blog Statistics
by J. Angelo Racoma on September 24th, 2006
I recently stumbled upon a July 2006 report by PEW Internet entitled Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers (PDF) and I was intrigued that the word WordPress did not appear on the text a single time. In the telephone survey done to determine blogger- and blog-related data, the most used blogging platform was LiveJournal, then followed by MySpace, then Blogger.
Where is WordPress here? I thought WP was almost synonymous with blogging already? Perhaps it’s bundled in with the 17% “something else” group, and the 38% “don’t know/rather not say” group. At any rate, I think it would also be interesting to know what BloggingPro readers use. Here’s a simple poll I made.
The poll is limited to five choices, though. If you choose “Other,” please do leave a comment on what software you’re using. I would also be interested to know what made you choose the blogging platform you’re currently using, be it included in the list or not.
Categories: Blog Statistics, Blogging Sense
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