Rob Larsen

Remember when I redesigned my home page? No? I made some changes based on the guidelines provided by usability.gov. Basically I cut down the amount of prose text and clarified the site choices available.

Well, not quite a month has passed, but I wanted to share the preliminary results with everyone anyway. By the metrics that I was targeting on that page (bounce rate and % of exit) the redesign was a resounding success. Here are the numbers:

So people are spending less time trying to figure out what to do, are less likely to immediately leave (bounce) and are less likely overall to make my home page the last page they visit on the site. I'll take improvements like that any time. Big ups to the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

Once I get my laptop back from HP, I'll be looking to see if I can experiment with a few more nuggets from that excellent resource. I'm definitely eying adjustments to some of the navigation pages around here. I'll be sure to publish the results as I get them.

Google Analytics: an excellent introduction/reference for the ubiquitous Google Analytics web site statistics package. I learned a ton and will refer to the book for a long time to come as I continue to tinker with both my own tracking and the lower tier statistics package we'll be offering clients at work. Highly recommended for web professionals of all stripes.

I'm currently reading the O'Reilly Google Analytics book, so of course I'm going to sandbox some stuff (albeit not here at this site.) One of the first things I seized on was the ability to track outgoing links by calling the urchinTracker() function onclick. Taking a few minutes out of my morning I put this together:
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drunkenfist.com ranks 105,631 with Quantcast

Interestingly, they also provide demographic information:

"This site reaches approximately 14,368 U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a more African American, more affluent, slightly more male than female, teen and young adult audience."

Compete ranks me 92,116 with 15,802 US visitors.

Those numbers, at least in terms of visitors, are reasonably close to my actual numbers (according to Google Analytics.)

So why does Alexa rank me 525,696 (290,588 latest. But the above numbers are for May anyway and my traffic has increased since)? What are the other two sites doing that Alexa isn't? Is it something to do with the demographics of the Alexa user?