2005 Statistics

During 2005, danandsherree.com grew quite a bit. In 2004, growth was both sporadic and erratic; 2005's growth was much more stable--whatever that means.

Some of the largest growth has been on the content of this site. There were 403 new pages added in 2005 (compared to 287 new pages in 2004). Lots of commenter growth, too: 427 comments were made in 2005, compared to only 99 comments in 2004!

The large increase in people leaving comments means there's also been a healthy increase in traffic, too. Something I'm discovering, though, is that it's awful difficult to effectively measure just how many visitors there are and how many pages they view. Things like referrer spam and search bots can easily throw off counts, and it's difficult to tell exactly what's real and what's not.

Consequently, it's a little tough to know how much growth there's been--further exagerrated by the fact that I've changed statistics packages a few times! According to Webalizer, January brought about 300 visitors; jump to December and that number has doubled to roughly 600 visitors.

The trouble is, those numbers don't quite make sense. Bandwidth has increased much more than two-fold: starting at about 75 MB/day in January and leaping to 300 MB/day in December. That indicates a roughly four times increase in traffic. Similarly, as noted above, the number of comments has increased about four times over the course of the year.

I'm primarily using Mint (view our installation) to monitor site statistics now, and plan to continue with it. (Sticking with one package is a good way to gauge growth, just so you can see the numbers change.) Hopefully at the end of 2006 I'll have a clearer view of how the traffic changed from 2005.