The Bicycle Touring 101 website first became publically available on Oct. 26, 2004 with less then 10 pages of content. Today is January 3, 2005 and there are 259 pages of content available. I wanted to take a moment to list a few statistics about this web site that hopefully you will find interesting.
March 2, 2005 - I have decided to update this page with some updated stats for the months of January and February, 2005.
Who reads the information on this site?
As of December 31, 2004 readers of this website come from the following countries ordered by number of pages served:
United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, Great Britain, Sweden, European Union, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Norway, Germany, Chile, Slovak Republic, France, Netherlands, Austria, Thailand, Brazil, Singapore, Estonia, Moldova, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, Iceland, Finland, Slovenia, Portugal, India, China, Lithuania, Israel, Italy, Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece, Russian Federation, Poland, Egypt, South Korea and Argentina.
The goal of this web site is to help bicycle tourists world-wide and a key part of the site logo represents this focus. Based on this list it appears that the site is at least reaching a world-wide audience. Over time I hope to hear from people in the guestbook who have found the site useful to them.
March 2, 2005 - Country list is as follows ordered by number of pages served:
United States, Canada, Australia, European Union, Great Britain, Isreal, Japan, Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, France, Norway, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Belgium, Spain, Brazil, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, China, Denmark, Italy, Czech Republic, Taiwan, Thailand, Russian Federation, Luxembourg, Poland, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Iceland, Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Nepal, Chile, Estonia, Lithuania, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Latvia, Slovak Republic, South Africa, Mauritius, Malaysia, Argentina, Egypt, Philippines, Jordan, Portugal, Fiji and Gambia.
How popular is the site in terms of linkage from other web sites?
Search engines like to use link popularity to measure how relevant a site is for information about a particular topic or subject area. The premise that people want to link to a site with relevant information related to their site is a reasonable one to me so I too am looking at how popular it is to link to Bicycle Touring 101.
I've been using a great tool by MarketLeap called the Link Popularity Checker to monitor this statistic myself. Using this tool it is easy to see that on Dec 1, 2004 the Bicycle Touring 101 website had a link popularity value of 0. Today the site has reached 132.
Looking at the legend you will find that this number represents a limited web presence. For me it is nice to see that other sites like the site enough to link to mine. In some cases these links were exchanged with the other site but it most cases the link was made because someone else found the site useful.
March 2, 2005 - Site linkage has reached 622. Bicycle Touring 101 is listed on page three of the MSN search engine results for the keywords "bicycle touring" giving it a position of around 25 out of over 1.6 million web sites using the same keywords.
How about visitor stats like unique visitors, hits, and stuff of that nature?
As of December 31, 2004 there were a total of 2,851 unique visitors to the website. A unique visitor is defined as someone who hasn't been at the site before. This is determined by the server software based on an ip address so it's not a perfect statistic but it is interesting in many ways.
Those 2,851 unique visitors came back to the site an average of 1.75 times which tells me that although there is a long way to go, the site is already interesting enough to people that they return periodically to check it out.
Number of pages and hits are much less meaningful stats. A hit is something as simple as loading an image. So if you go to a page with 9 images you are generating 10 hits, 9 for the images and one for the page.
Nevertheless there have been 43,656 pages delivered to readers accounting for 115,874 hits.
To me these numbers are impressive especially when you consider that this is based on the first two months of live operation and that most search engines are unaware of the Bicycle Touring 101 web site yet. In fact less then 4 percent of traffic to this site comes from search engines. My understanding is that most sites receive around 60 to 70 percent of their traffic from search engines so it will be interesting to see what happens as search engines find Bicycle Touring 101.
March 2, 2005 - The number of unique visitors continues to increase reaching 4164 for the past two months. Average number of visits is 1.67 times per visitor. 93,520 pages delivered to readers.
Support from contributors and interest in special offers from vendors?
As of today 44 people have contributed to the Bicycle Touring 101 website. These contributions have ranged from quotes and pictures all the way to multiple complete articles. This support by others has been deeply appreciated and hopefully the contributors are well aware of this!
So far only one vendor has provided a special incentive to the contributors. It is interesting to note that Schwalbe North America has enjoyed business from 34 percent of the contributors even through it is winter in the Northern hemisphere and Christmas time has been here.
Many of the contributors who have taken up the offer are long distance tourers who will give their purchases a real workout during their next tour. I expect that next year more feedback about their use of these tires will start to appear on Mailing Lists, bicycle forums and hopefully the Bicycle Touring 101 website.
Congratulations to Schwalbe North America for offering the contributors something in return for their efforts to help this web site grow. Hopefully other vendors will also step up to help out this special group of individuals too!
March 2, 2005 - 62 contributors have helped add content to the site. There are now two vendors providing special incentives to the contributors.
What about feedback from the readers?
This is the most important question on this page. Creating an extensive website like this one takes significant work and effort. Since this is a volunteer project that takes time and some money to get started it's been most gratifying to read positive feedback from people who are reading this site.
One group of people who this site is trying to help are people who are new to bicycle touring. I am really enjoying reading surveys or guestbook entries from people who are interested in bicycle touring and reading about it here for the first time having never gone on a bicycle tour of their own yet.
March 2, 2005 - Very positive feedback continues to come from the readers. Site specific polls also reflect this information as well. An even more important indicator is that more people have stepped forward to help.
Am I enjoying myself?
Tremendously!You can't take on a project of this nature without understanding how big the effort will be and the funny thing is that this website is likely to keep growing with all the neat ideas that I either think up or hear about from the readers.
All of the numbers in the world will not make a difference at two o'clock in the morning if you hate what you are working on. What does make a difference is the opportunity to share touring with others. In this case I am not just talking about the readers of the site but also the people who I have been allowed to interview and get to know during that process.
On a professional level I work in the computer technology industry so the knowledge gained building this web site is something that directly relates to my professional life. I don't know exactly when I will be called upon to use my html, php and sql knowledge but it's nice to have the skill set in the backpocket just waiting to be called upon.
March 2, 2005 - It's amazing how many incredibly nice and interesting people I've met from all over the world since starting this web site. I look forward to meeting more!
Any closing thoughts?
It's been fun so far. As I said working with the contributors and doing the interviews has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate the effort that others have made to help out!
Several additional features for this web site are in the planning stages so in time you can expect to see more new things appearing on the web site. One feature that I've mentioned before and that I hope to pursue at some point is having multiple language versions of this site available. That's another huge endeavour that will take some significant effort to make happen but nevertheless it is something that I hope to pursue someday.
March 2, 2005 - In the past month I've allowed the scope of the site to expand with several new sections including ones about books related to bicycle touring. Today I added the Surprise Me! (random page selector) which allows people to select a page at random from the site. From a completely computer geek viewpoint it was neat to program and cool to see in action. You might want to consider giving it a try! (grin)
As time passes I will likely update this page with newer information. Feel free to drop me an email if you have questions about anything on this page.
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