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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
November Harvested
1 December 2013
With autumn waning, we've pulled in the harvest. November was a very encouraging month here with new highs in many readership metrics as we continued to deliver the news that matters in as efficient a format as we can devise.
Autumn Leaves. At the de Young Museum where we went to see Hockney. Nikon D300, f8, 1/60 second and ISO 400 at 62mm.
On the editorial front, we maintained our pace as the news calmed down a bit. We published 12 features, two reviews (although our Mavericks series included four parts), 22 commented news items, eight editor's notes (including 29 Around The Horn items) and two site notes. That amounts to 49 stories.
The site evolved a little bit, too.
As one reader put it to us recently, "You do a lot of work." Unfortunately, the totem pole of headlines makes it hard to tell. You check a few at the top and you're done. If you don't visit every day, you miss things.
Our Archive was designed not just for the monthly vistor who wants to keep up with us but to make it easy to find the important stuff. That's what the news ticker was for, too.
So the question was, "How could we highlight our work on the front page?"
Our solution is to use the left column to list the current major stories (everything but news and notes) by category. We liked that so much, we added it to our archive indices, showing what they contain. Thanks to another reader's suggestion, we also added a link to a page for each of those categories, too.
And, judging by our traffic, you found it helpful. You discovered things you otherwise might have missed.
Webalizer Graph. December 2012 through November 2013.
That little change doesn't explain the significant jump in traffic the site experienced in November, though. It was just too large. We served more pages in November than we have ever served files. Typically there are several files (style, code, images, etc.) included in one page. So that's saying something.
And consequently our files and hits were significantly more. Files served about doubled our previous high and hits were about 50 percent more than the previous high or double our normal number.
Last month we were happy to note a record number of unique sites, a number that tends to reflect actual readers. This month we had a 130 percent increase in unique sites. We had a 200 percent increase in March but as we built readership through the year, large increases like that are harder to come by.
And as we approach the first anniversary of Photo Corners, that's a pretty picture. Thank you!