My Blogger software tells me that this is my 100th post in the Spitfire Site News. Wow! A milestone. I’ll celebrate it by taking a short look into how the site is performing.

Content statistics

The Spitfire Site was launched on 10th September 2007, and a quick calculation shows that 126 days have passed since the premiere day. One hundred blog posts in 126 days mean little more than five updates to the site every week, and I consider this to be a good achievement.

Before starting the site, I planned for about two updates every week based on the assumption that initially most of the material would have to be prepared entirely by myself. The reality exceeded my expectations by a margin. The voluntary support from the visitors in form of photos, articles, artwork and models has been much better than anticipated. It shows in the number of article pages which form the fabric of the site. Here are some statistics:

• 13 history articles


• 6 camouflage features


• 37 modelling articles, showing over 50 Spitfire models


• 56 posts in Historic Photographs


• 50 video posts


• 17 items in Art & Memorabilia

In total, this gives 179 content web pages. I’ve read somewhere on the web that a site needs to have at least 300-400 meaningful pages to keep the interest of a returning visitor. If this target is anything to go by, we’re well underway towards achieving it. Actually, Google has already counted “about 348” pages from the site in its search index, but this of course includes the front page and various indices.

Our visitors

As of this writing (January 2008), the site enjoys a steady flow of about 190 visits a day. Comparison with previous months shows a reassuring increase, from 115 daily visits in October and 155 visits in November.

According to Google Analytics, a total of 21,875 unique visitors were logged since the premiere day. 34% percent of these have visited the site more than once, or approximately 7500 people. Overwhelming!

The average visitor clicks her/his way through 9 pages of the site. This is a very good result indicating that the contents are met with interest.

Where do the visitors come from? The top ten countries this month are as follows:

1. United Kingdom 23.20%


2. United States 16.97%


3. Australia 6.78%


4. Canada 5.60%


5. Sweden 4.08%


6. France 4.00%


7. Germany 3.57%


8. Russia 3.37%


9. Japan 3.13%


10. Czech Republic 2.56%

Summary

Concluding this analysis I feel that the site has been off to a good start. The visitors have been hugely supportive, and I feel we have a good ground for further development of this site during 2008. Thanks to all and I hope you will find reasons to return to this site often.

This map shows which countries the Spitfire Site visitors come from. Darker shades of green correspond to higher number of visits

Click to enlarge image

Labels: webmaster