October 17 Just Rambling Again.
Web site building is somewhere between a hobby and an obsession for me these days. I've spent a lot of hours and midnight oil sitting at my keyboard plunking away with my one fingered typing.
The visitor counts to my Cards From Ogden Point site tell me that I must be doing something that people like. At noon on October 15 which is the middle of the month the way I see it, the visitor count for October 2006 had passed the full month totals for March, June July and August. The total page count for the site for 2006 passed the 2005 total in August, and the total visitor count for 2006 passed the 2005 count in September. The site is getting busier -- and remember it is run from a computer in my home, not from a web service provider.
I did major updates of the whole site to sort out page loading and optimization over the last few weeks and I had some fun putting together a few Halloween cards. Check the links lower on the page for the Halloween stuff.
I also tried a little test of human nature in all of this. I sent out about 50 of my cards to friends and acquaintances for Canadian Thanksgiving which was on October 9 this year. The cards were animated and got really good responses from several of the recipients. The interesting thing in all of that was that to see the card, the recipient had to scroll down the page past a very bright and obvious area on the card receipt page asking them to vote in the current CardMaster competition. The voting notice is similar to the one at the bottom of this page. Only four of the fifty recipients voted. This result parallels the general results for the site where for the card receipt count October at half month, has passed the counts for 8 of the previous 12 full months. I have had about 400 visitors view 700 cards in October. I have 12 votes in the contest including my test vote to see that the voting link worked. The interesting part of all that is that most if not all the 400 visitors didn't even notice the voting box despite its dancing Halloween graphics. It becomes what I refer to as "Furniture" -- a room has to have furniture and unless you have a reason to remember it you don't even notice it. A Web Site has backgrounds and layout things (even advertising on most) that have to be there. You may remember a particularly comfortable sofa in a particular living room. In most living rooms you just expect the sofa to be there and don't pay attention to it. In an office you expect a desk -- you may notice a particularly clean one, or a particularly messy one and in 90% of the offices you visit you don't even notice the desk. We have become used to picking out what we want to see on a Magazine or newspaper page and/or a Web Page without noticing anything else on the page.
The challenge every Web Site Creator (and for that matter every shop keeper, artist, sales person or anyone who wants something to be seen) is to create a noticeable attention getter without it being obnoxious. The reason people come to Cards From Ogden Point is to send Cards, not to vote for the site. My "hook" or attention getting device is the Photographs. They must be pleasing because more and more people are coming back to use them. The "hook" also includes the ability to use the Photos in a Posty because if it were just the pictures, my other sites would be getting the attention. The contest brings people to see the site whether they vote or not, and that is why the contest is run. The contest benefits the whole Posty "family" because it brings people not just to my site but to the whole system.
The Halloween Pages let you add Ghostly figures like these ones to your Posty:
The Halloween Cards
The Great Pumpkin Patch
The visitor counts to my Cards From Ogden Point site tell me that I must be doing something that people like. At noon on October 15 which is the middle of the month the way I see it, the visitor count for October 2006 had passed the full month totals for March, June July and August. The total page count for the site for 2006 passed the 2005 total in August, and the total visitor count for 2006 passed the 2005 count in September. The site is getting busier -- and remember it is run from a computer in my home, not from a web service provider.
I did major updates of the whole site to sort out page loading and optimization over the last few weeks and I had some fun putting together a few Halloween cards. Check the links lower on the page for the Halloween stuff.
I also tried a little test of human nature in all of this. I sent out about 50 of my cards to friends and acquaintances for Canadian Thanksgiving which was on October 9 this year. The cards were animated and got really good responses from several of the recipients. The interesting thing in all of that was that to see the card, the recipient had to scroll down the page past a very bright and obvious area on the card receipt page asking them to vote in the current CardMaster competition. The voting notice is similar to the one at the bottom of this page. Only four of the fifty recipients voted. This result parallels the general results for the site where for the card receipt count October at half month, has passed the counts for 8 of the previous 12 full months. I have had about 400 visitors view 700 cards in October. I have 12 votes in the contest including my test vote to see that the voting link worked. The interesting part of all that is that most if not all the 400 visitors didn't even notice the voting box despite its dancing Halloween graphics. It becomes what I refer to as "Furniture" -- a room has to have furniture and unless you have a reason to remember it you don't even notice it. A Web Site has backgrounds and layout things (even advertising on most) that have to be there. You may remember a particularly comfortable sofa in a particular living room. In most living rooms you just expect the sofa to be there and don't pay attention to it. In an office you expect a desk -- you may notice a particularly clean one, or a particularly messy one and in 90% of the offices you visit you don't even notice the desk. We have become used to picking out what we want to see on a Magazine or newspaper page and/or a Web Page without noticing anything else on the page.
The challenge every Web Site Creator (and for that matter every shop keeper, artist, sales person or anyone who wants something to be seen) is to create a noticeable attention getter without it being obnoxious. The reason people come to Cards From Ogden Point is to send Cards, not to vote for the site. My "hook" or attention getting device is the Photographs. They must be pleasing because more and more people are coming back to use them. The "hook" also includes the ability to use the Photos in a Posty because if it were just the pictures, my other sites would be getting the attention. The contest brings people to see the site whether they vote or not, and that is why the contest is run. The contest benefits the whole Posty "family" because it brings people not just to my site but to the whole system.
The Halloween Pages let you add Ghostly figures like these ones to your Posty:
The Halloween Cards
The Great Pumpkin Patch
posted by ...ron... | 12:41 PM
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