Pretty cool traffic growth over the past year here. We now average about 3,500 visitors and 13,000 page views a day, and we've grown about 250% over the past year. We're closing in on 3 million page views a year---that's a lot of amateur UAV action!
(click on the picture for a big version)
This site is a social network, not a discussion group, so it seems very comfortable to those of us in the MySpace/Facebook generation and a little messy to those more familiar with more traditional forms. It's optimized for newcomers, which discussion groups are not (just imagine trying to learn about UAVs by arriving at the RC Groups forum!)
It's also worth noting that this site is about 5x bigger in terms of traffic than the RC Groups UAV section, so we must be doing something right ;-)
That said, it can certainly be improved and we'll keep working on it. Next step for us is a wiki.
Great to see that traffic is up. However, I feel that navigation of the site is very convoluted and messy compared to standard forum sites like rcgroups, helifreak, flyinggiants, etc. The site layout is not very scalable and I think these problems will be amplified as more people join and contribute. A similar thing happened with letsmakerobots and it is now very hard to keep up with new posts or projects because it is setup more as a blog than a forum, and is frankly just unintuitive in design.
Reworking the site would obviously be a major undertaking but I am sure there are people here who would be willing to help out. I'd be interested to hear if other users feel the same way.
Agreed.
I think the increase in popularity reflects the amazing development that has happened over that last year.
Congrats to Chris and Jordi (and the rest of the community)! The more members, the greater the development!
Comments
This site is a social network, not a discussion group, so it seems very comfortable to those of us in the MySpace/Facebook generation and a little messy to those more familiar with more traditional forms. It's optimized for newcomers, which discussion groups are not (just imagine trying to learn about UAVs by arriving at the RC Groups forum!)
It's also worth noting that this site is about 5x bigger in terms of traffic than the RC Groups UAV section, so we must be doing something right ;-)
That said, it can certainly be improved and we'll keep working on it. Next step for us is a wiki.
Reworking the site would obviously be a major undertaking but I am sure there are people here who would be willing to help out. I'd be interested to hear if other users feel the same way.
I think the increase in popularity reflects the amazing development that has happened over that last year.
Congrats to Chris and Jordi (and the rest of the community)! The more members, the greater the development!