I’ll probably catch some flack for doing it, but I recently submitted one of my posts to DIGG. In doing so, I started a study (as well as promoted myself). I’ve been meaning to start a website about Blogs and CMS agents, but I don’t have enough stats to get a good idea of the people that are using these type of programs.
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A quick note about DIGG. The way you word your post and the topic itself have a heck of a lot to do with the traffic you get. The following 2 posts where light years away from each other in terms of incoming traffic.
Newest post: The Perfect Template Engine
gibcus submitted by gibcus 2 days ago (via webtekconcepts.com)
Still looking for the perfect template engine? Well, its probably already installed on your computer, not your webserver… Looking for user comments since I’m probably going to start up a website that deals with Blogging and CMS. -No Comments (on DIGG), 649 hits from this. No extra DIGG mirror website coverage.
Older Post: eBay is dead
alexlawrence submitted by alexlawrence 31 days ago (via webtekconcepts.com)
Found an interesting story about the problems with ebay and how its going downhill. -55 Comments (on DIGG), A Topic Warning: “The Content in this Article May be Inaccurate”, 6400+ hits and a crap load of DIGG mirror website coverage (ie: EveryDigg). I’m still getting links back to the eBay is Dead article and comments, a month later.
The first one looks more like a survey when you read it. I wasn’t attempting anything like this when I wrote it, but trying to make the post a bit more down to earth and acknowledging that I was the author of the story. Note to self…bad…
The Post
The post was on Digg brought in a tad bit of traffic, but not much.
On top of this, after I submitted to DIGG, I updated my RPC Pings to the list on the WordPress Codex. I did want to throw a caution out to anyone attempting this. If you are on a shared hosting platform (if you don’t know what that is, you’re on it), don’t do this…
- Reasons for NOT doing this: One reason is that a normal blog post (ie: Publish) can take up to a full minute to post. This is because each of the services is contacted individually and my blog has to wait for each one to respond back saying “yup, got it!”. It causes a crap load of traffic out and can cause a heck of a lot of automated traffic back in all at once (ie: no adsense ads are viewed or clicked on) - its just “robotic” traffic. I’m fortunate enough to have my own Virtual Server that isn’t loaded down by a lot of sites at the moment, so it doesn’t affect me too much.
The Study
The short of it is to see what resolutions people are using, but it goes a little beyond that. I’ve covered this in the past, but I used a very small part of my stats for this. Since DIGG reaches a global audience and I wasn’t using Google Analytics when I got DUGG earlier, I figured this would be perfect. The other reason for this study was to see how long the average viewer stays on the website. Given the amount of people looking for Blogging and CMS software (thats like saying Personal Identification Number Number….), I wanted an audience that would be into the software that I wanted to cover.
On top of all of that, I wanted user comments about the use of CSS on the web as well. If you looked at the post, that didn’t go over too well.
The last thing I wanted to view was some of the Google Analytic data like Connection Speed, Flash Version, Screen Colors, etc. If you use all this data and tailor it to what you’re mostly seeing, things will be a little more popular. I’ve grown a little tired of trying to make everyone happy with my designs - its time to focus on the main drivers of my traffic.
The Software
At first, I want to focus on Blog related software such as:
WordPress
b2Evolution
bBlog
Blojsom
MovableType
and several others.
Later, I’ll probably delve into CMS engines like:
Joomla
Mambo - As a quick note, Mambo still drives approx 23% of the traffic to my site since I hacked up some templates about a year ago and posted how to preview with your own content. It surprises me that I still get this much traffic from a post a year old.
PHPNuke
….and MANY others.
The Data
I needed to know what to design for instead of the tried and true, days of old, design for 800×600. In studying the newest data coming across my site, I found out that 60% of the traffic that visits uses some form of Firefox. 30% use a version or another of IE. The rest are Safari, Opera, Konqueror and Camino (I had to look Camino up, its based on the Gecko engine). So, for browsers, I’ll design for Firefox and IE. Due to my nature, I’ll support as far back as I feel comfortable, but not to the point where I need to jump through hoops and balance a milk bone on my nose.
Resolutions are a little more tricky. I currently use 3 myself: 1024×768 (Laptop), 1280×1024 and 1440×900 (Widescreen baby). The top 5 visiting resolutions are: 1024×768 (28.33%), 1280×1024 (24.44%), 1440×900 (10.00%), 1280×800 (8.33%), 1920×1200 (7.78%). There are a few more, but its not worth getting into. I was honestly surprised to see 1024×768 as the primary resolution, but I’ve never been one to design a website at 100% width.
Language, thats right, language is one of my concerns. After moving to Germany for a bit, I started to really understand how outsiders to the English language must feel. Oddly though, more than 70% of my traffic is from the US, Canada or UK.
Last, I wanted to know about connection speeds. Well, I’m here to officially say that Dialup is almost dead. A whopping 6.5% of my visitors use dialup technology. I figured it would be low, but wow. Now, some might wonder why I wanted to know connection speeds. With “Web 2.0″ popping up left, right, up, down, north, sou….well, lets just say that now I can focus more on quality of graphics instead of doing everything I can to make them small for dialup connections.
Now, I’ve just got to start the design process by figuring out the layout of the site, how heavy I want graphics and I have to hack all the CMS’ to do what I want…blah…
