shanemcdonald.org

Now that the World Cup is over, I’ve been looking at the website stats for my website. Overall, the World Cup saw an almost 200% increase in web traffic as people searched for match information and also running commentary of games in progress.

For the duration of the World Cup, June 12th to July 12th I had 63,100 Visitors to the site and 126,900 pages viewed. So for this year there have been 394,000 visitors to the site and over 854,000 page views generated – and hopefully there should be a quarter of a million visitors to the site, and 1,600,000 page views by the end of the year.

During the last month I would have thought World Cup topics would overtake other search terms on the site but not necessarily.

The top queries to this site were as follows – the keywords are linked if you want to read the actual sections they refer to.

Top 5 Referring Search Queries
4g iphone release date ireland / 4g iphone release date england / 4g iphone release date netherlands
keyboard chords list / basic keyboard chords / easy piano chords
guitar chords list / guitar minor and major chords
queen discography
reading music for beginners

There were also some news items or local events which showed.

Top Search Queries in the News
carlow to kilkenny motorway opening time / m9 kilkenny opening date
iphone signal calculation
vou vou zela / vous vous zela

It seems that the popularity of the iPhone is mapped likewise onto the web and it shows how many people are  searching for iPhone related items. With the iPhone 4G being released this month in Ireland and UK websites which have iPhone related information will see a rise in traffic.

Happy New Year to you all and I hope you all have a really great 2010.

Thanks to the 486,892 visitors who visited the website in 2009.

Heres to 2010!

After about 2 years of the same design I have decided to update the design of the website.

[caption id="attachment_456" align="aligncenter" width="499" caption="New shanemcdonald.org Design"][/caption]

I have used the design of the Blog (iTheme), as a basis for the design and have opted for a more CSS styled website.
There are still a few design bugs, some optimisations not yet done but the hard work of doing the transition has been done.

Using the Server Side Inicludes the transition to the new design only took about 9 minutes for the whole website.

Hard to believe the site is going nearly 10 years now and averaging about 1,900 visitors per day and about 4,500 page views daily. It still doesn’t come close to the 35,000 visitors per day which shanemcdonald.com got at its peak.

There is also a small widget on the bottom of the site to help with social media, search, twittering, rss feeds, site translations etc.

I’m in the process of updating the website following a change from PHP4 to PHP5.

I am also updating the design of the front page and the main music section also. This should be complete in the next week for the front page and by the end of August for the Music section.

I can’t believe how big the site has got in the past few years. There are over 14,000 files on the web server. So I will have to review the site bit by bit.

Just a demonstration of where the traffic on the site was, compared to where it is today.

The image below is from Statcounter, the green line is PageViews and the Blue is Visitors.

[caption id="attachment_77" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Traffic Details for the past 30 days - view the most recent days, and traffic is up over 340%"][/caption]

I’m just glad this is finished with and I can start adding a bit more content !