Six Months of Blog.SpoonGraphics

Six months on since the creation of the Spoon Graphics blog, and it seems to have developed nicely! Looking back at the stats the site has had a steady growth in visitors and subscribers, so I’d like to share with you those statistics and figures to help any startup bloggers promote their content and furthermore hopefully gain some advise from you guys on how to progress SpoonGraphics further in the future.

A bit of History

The SpoonGraphics blog was started back in April 2007, as an addon to my main portfolio site. I’d seen various other designer blogs and thought I would give it a go with my own site, firstly to gain experience of the WordPress application and secondly to provide myself with some form of incentive to create design material in my spare time to develop my skills and techniques.

The basis of the blog has always been Tutorials and Freebies, after learning a lot of new skills from following online tutorials and using free Open Source applications this was my way of paying back into the system, to hopefully help others in the same way I was helped myself.

The original blog design was a custom theme produced pretty much from the main website design, this managed to get quite a few features on CSS galleries but in August I decided to give the site a whole new look. The blog had become more of a site of it’s own, rather than an addition to my portfolio, so it deserved something different in terms of design. This was a perfect chance to put into practice ideas I had stored in my head but never had the chance to implement on client’s websites, so off I went sketching out concepts and scanning bits of old paper I’d collected. The resulting design is as you see it now, which has received more inclusions in CSS Galleries and many comments of praise from viewers which I am very thankful of.

The Growth of Blog.SpoonGraphics

Pulled straight from the old Google Analiticator, here are the figures from the last six months:

April (17th Onwards)
Visits: 1368
Average Per Day: 45
Top Content: Homepage / Logo Tutorial
Top Traffic Sources: CSS Bloom / Pixel2Life
Big Breaks: CSS Bloom / Pixel2Life

May
Visits: 21992
Average Per Day: 709
Top Content: T-Shirt Tutorial / Logo Tutorial
Top Traffic Sources: Good-Tutorials / Pixel2Life
Big Breaks: Good-Tutorials / Smashing Magazine

June
Visits: 22452
Average Per Day: 748
Top Content: Freebies Category / Logo Tutorial
Top Traffic Sources: Good-Tutorials / Vecteezy
Big Breaks: Vecteezy
Downtime: 3 days

July
Visits: 35165
Average Per Day: 1134
Top Content: Freebies Category / Animate Logo Tutorial
Top Traffic Sources: Good-Tutorials / Vecteezy
Big Breaks: Stumbleupon

August
Visits: 30548
Average Per Day: 985
Top Content: Freebies Category / Homepage
Top Traffic Sources: Vecteezy / Good-Tutorials
Big Breaks: CSS Mania
New Design Released
Downtime: 1 day

September
Visits: 28973
Average Per Day: 965
Top Content: Freebies Category / Punk Collection Vectors
Top Traffic Sources: Vecteezy / Good-Tutorials

October
Visits: 63552
Average Per Day: 2050
Top Content: Homepage / Making of Frankenspoon Tutorial
Top Traffic Sources: Stumbleupon / Vecteezy
Big Breaks: Stumbleupon / Bestwebgallery
Other: Featured in Web Designer Magazine

All Time Stats
Visits: 204050
Average Time of Site: 2mins 26secs
87% Referring Sites / 6% Direct Traffic / 5% Search Engines

As you can see, October has been a great month for the blog, doubling the number of visits from the previous months all thanks to referrals from Stumbleupon. Other big breaks are sites that have provided exceptional peaks in the number of visitors, some of which were for a single day and others that bumped up the average visits to the next level. In terms of content it seems like producing something slightly different produces the best results, the T-Shirt Tutorial, Frankenspoon, Animated Logo Tutorial and Monster Character series all fall under the highest rated content.

Top 10 Referring Sites – the sites that made it happen!
Good-Tutorials
Vecteezy
Tutorialized
Stumbleupon
Pixel2Life
Direct Traffic
Google
Smashing Magazine
Bestwebgallery
DrWeb.de

Other Useful Stats

While browsing around in Google Analytics I came across some quite surprising (and some unsurprising) figures. Well done to the Firefox team who dominate the traffic of SpoonGraphics with 55.71% of users, leaving Internet Explorer behind with 30.76%. Included in this figure is Explorer 6.0 making up 56.10% and Explorer 7.0 with 43.37%, so it seems there are a considerable number of users still on Internet Explorer 6, unfortunately!

Windows users dominate the Operating System department with 80% with Macs behind on 20%, it will be interesting to see how that figure increases with iMacs and Macbooks becoming more popular in the home/personal market.

Most surprising of all I thought was the browser stats, long gone has 800×600 but I thought with the site being design related 1024×768 would be quite far down the list. In actual fact quite the opposite with the top resolutions being a fairly close split between 1024×768 (29.87%) and 1280×1024 (25.51%) .

RSS Subscribers

Last of all a word on the SpoonGraphics subscribers, who have been on a steady increase since day one. I notice quite an increase lately, possibly down the the mini series of character tutorials which proves that little experiment has worked so far!

I’d like to find out a little more about you guys, it would be interesting to see who finds my content interesting enough to subscribe. Maybe I’ll run a little poll or create a Flickr group as I’ve seen on other sites!

The Future of SpoonGraphics

The latest boost in traffic from Stumbleupon shows there are always new ways for people to discover the site and generate the extra traffic to boost up the stats to the next level. I have a little note on my desk to look into Digg, Reddit and other bookmarking sites to see they can be used to the site’s advantage. What advise would you give? What sites should I submit content to (without being a spammer)? And furthermore what would you like to see Freebie or Tutorial wise on the site?

Comments below..!