Website Visitor Stats – Weeks 3 & 4 Results

“Work is hectic! New projects and urgent matters to attend to. The website isn’t a high priority at the minute.” Sound familiar?

Even though we’re advocates that your website should be at the centre of your business – we’ve fallen into that very trap ourselves over the last two weeks. Website visitor results accordingly haven’t done so well. With less promotion and engagement we see a direct fall in numbers.

This in fact is a good thing! Only because it serves as one of the best lessons of all.

Promotion and advertising takes dedicated time and hard work!

With this in mind we’ll make the concerted effort over the next few weeks to get back on track with the experiment.

Our third week sees a fall in unique visitor numbers from 89 to 56.

Week 3 Results

Week 4 results …

WordPress automatically inserts paragraph tags

Because WordPress tries to make your text input into sensible and valid HTML it adds paragraph tags <p></p> to the content where it thinks it should.

This though can sometimes cause problems when you have a special page/template using other HTML.

To get around the problem you can use the following in your template before ‘the_content’ tag:

<?php remove_filter (‘the_content’, ‘wpautop’); ?>

Note that if this doesn’t work you might already have formatting filters built into your functions.php and you’ll have to investigate that.

Website Visitor Stats – Week 2 Results

We’re into the second week of our 12 week series to improve visitor numbers for our own website. By taking our own website advice we’ll be blogging the results every week and reporting on our Marketing and SEO techniques.

Our second week sees a big improvement with unique visitor numbers doubling with a 102% increase on the previous week.

If we look a little more at the stats we see also that the number of pages read by visitors (Page Views) has increased from 109 to 263. You can see some more in depth results below.

How did we do this?

To drive numbers this week we’ve done the following:

introduced and configured the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast
added a support page for our WordPress plugin (FlickrAPI)
added a working demo of our Magento eCommerce online store

Last week’s plan was to introduce some user guide videos …

Malton Web Design Visitor Stats – Week 1

We’re one week into showing off our SEO skills. In the following 12 weeks we’ll be applying our own advice on building up visitor numbers to our own website.

Making stunning 3D views

Today we’ve been playing with some new Photoshop Actions courtesy of the team at http://www.psdcovers.com.

Essentially the guys at PSD Covers have done all the hard work and created Photoshop Actions so that users like me can simply put together a 2D Design and convert it into something like the iPad view above.  Other views are available from iPhones to Soup Cans.

There’s also a very honest and interesting blog post telling the story of how their website was created and what work was put in to get their results.  Hopefully they’ll be making money from the site soon.

Much kudos to them!

Malton Website Visitor Statistics – Starter Week

For this past week in April 2012 we have around an average of 5 visits to the website each day. That’s not many considering we are based between the two large towns of Scarborough and York. We’ll attempt to start targeting these two areas first.

Initially we will link up three main areas. Our Blog section (which you’re currently reading), Twitter and Facebook.

Our blog will offer advice for all kinds of clients, as well as advice for other Web Designers / Developers and hopefully over the following weeks we’ll be able to report on our own increased numbers.

Who is visiting your website?

Everyone wants to improve website visitor numbers!

The first thing we ask is “How many visitors are you getting right now?”

Worryingly some websites still have no statistics integrated so you have no measure of who’s visiting your website and where they are coming from?

WordPress makes updating websites easy

WordPress is our Content Management System (CMS) of choice when it comes many of our client sites.

We’ve been creating sites with WordPress since our early days of blogging and have watched its development flourish and grow to evolve into one of the most popular CMS with millions of users worldwide.

We love it for many reasons but here are a few which might be important to you;

clients can maintain their own website easily
future changes to the design of your site won’t affect the existing content
it’s free!  there’s no charge to buy it.
it’s Open Source so is highly customizable meaning we can easily create bespoke  modules just for you. For example – adding cars, properties, in fact… anything you want to sell or show off.
you get the benefit of a well structured site with decent built in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) .

More importantly …

Malton Marketplace Sheep

I’ve been starting to take photos while I’m out and about and this pic was just too good not to share.

While passing Malton Market I noticed this valiant escape attempt. I’m glad I wasn’t the sheep underneath!