justaddwater.dk

Today is our anniversary! One year ago, on this day, Jesper and I sat down in the office to chat. It was Friday and we quickly started talking about our favorite subject: What could we do to raise awareness of usability and web standards inside Capgemini?

We discussed the ups and downs of newsletters, meetings, knowledge sharing groups, wikis and blogs. We talked about if we should share our thoughts with the whole world or if this should just be another one of those “Capgemini-eyes-only” things – Well, to make a short story long, we fairly quickly decided to share our thoughts with the whole world and start a blog – well it was also the hot potato at the time I guess … it still is ;). I had some leftover domains from the dot-com era and asked Jesper if we could use justaddwater.dk as our base of operations – he quickly agreed.

A slogan, a WordPress installation and a quick shopping spree over at iStockphoto later we where settled, and so it all started with a statement in our First Post. Later on we went back and revised our blog purpose.

Along the way…

This has been a very exiting journey. We have been all over the world (well USA, UK and India to be precise – but it sure feels like it). In the process we’ve ended up meeting a lot of very friendly people (both IRL and online), and this has definitely been the best part of the experience.

It wouldn’t be the same without Dan Webb, David Black, David Heinemeier Hansson, Eric Reiss, Jakob Nielsen, Jakob Skjerning, Jared Spool, Joe Clark, John S. Rhodes (I heard from Jesper that your wife is pregnant – Congratulations!), Line Pedersen, Luis Villa, Obie Fernandez, Olle Jonsson, Steve Krug, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Thomas Visby Snitker, Trine-Maria + many, many more (this list is far from complete!) … and not to forget, of cause our boss Jacob Strange (you need to get a blog!) who lets us blog and fool around with new and exiting stuff in Capgemini.

Statistics

I think that I’ll end this birthday post with some statistics… In the beginning I tried to publish statistics every month. But for some reason 5 months later I stopped – So here is a quick roundup:

Ranking

Just a couple of days ago Google gave us a very nice birthday present, they bumped us from PageRank 4 to 6 overnight, so this is now our current Google Page Rank:

Thank you Google :)

Visitor count

Since we started tracking with Google Analytics we’ve had about 25,000 visitors, with a combined average of about 75 per day. The last half year that number has been closer to about a 100 unique visitors per day.

All Time Top 5 Stories

1. Live search explained
2. AJAX businesscase: Reduce development costs and increase usability
3. How to indicate required or optional form fields
4. AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value
5. Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool

Source: Google Analytics

Browser Versions

Browser Versions, Year 1 – Source: Google Analytics

As the graph clearly shows, over half of our audience is using Mozilla Firefox (56.45%). Next comes Internet Explorer by Microsoft with 29.39%, Safari by Apple with 6.60% and Opera with 4.57%. The long tail includes Camillo, “Mozilla Compatible Agent”, Konqueror, Netscape (still alive and kicking), Galeon, gzip, HTC-8100 and WebSpear.

Other graphs

We have to thank Max Kiesler for writing his Round-up of 30 AJAX Tutorials. As the graph below shows this generated over 7% of all our traffic (not counting all the spin-offs!). Besides that Ajaxian is responsible for over 10% and Google and Technorati provide us almost 9% of our visitors.

Visits by Source, Year 1 – Source: Google Analytics

The next graph is simple. A quarter of all our visitors are returning to our blog after visiting before. I don’t know if this is a lot or not compared to other blogs, but I’m happy to see that we do not bore all our readers ;)

Visits by New and Returning, Year 1 – Source: Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: birthday, anniversary, justaddwater.dk, web standards, usability, blog, blogging, weblog, web statistics, ajax, graphs, wordpress, google analytics, Max Kiesler, Dan Webb, David Black, David Heinemeier Hansson, DHH, Eric Reiss, Jakob Nielsen, Jakob Skjerning, Jared Spool, Joe Clark, John Rhodes, Line Pedersen, Luis Villa, Obie Fernandez, Olle Jonsson, Steve Krug, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Thomas Visby Snitker, Trine-Maria

This entry was posted by Thomas Watson Steen on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 17:53 (GMT-1) and is filed under Blogging, justaddwater.dk, Web Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.