Officially, I made this site public on November 25, 2009. It wasn’t a day I had planned on launching because I never had a day in mind, it just happened to be the day I published my first article. That article was, Smashing Magazine Killed The Community (Or Maybe It Was Me), and generated way more interest than I could have had imagined. Part of the article talks about the need for higher quality content in the web design community. When discussing this point I couldn’t help but have this nagging idea in my head that it is pointless to talk about such things unless you have proof that quality can also generate traffic.
The reason there is such a high focus on list type entries is because those are the ones that generate the most links and tweets (unproven, really just taking a guess here). They are easy to digest and require little thought so they are passed around quickly. Writing them takes less effort and you aren’t putting your opinion out on the line as you might with another type of article. When you put things in this perspective it is understandable why many sites only wish to focus on lists.
However, in the long term, I am still of the opinion that articles that generate discussion and thought amongst the community are more beneficial. You build a better reputation, you become memorable and your site begins to develop a community. If you are looking to make money, it is hard to beat a great reputation and a strong community, the money almost makes itself in those scenarios.
Either way, I figure it is only fair that I show you the traffic on Drawar from time to time to not only prove my point about high quality articles being able to compete with lists, but also to use it as an educational tool for all of us looking to increase the traffic to our sites.
Here we go. You can click on the images to get the full size.

As you can see this is the overall traffic stats for the first 14 days of Drawar. If you compare it to the giants like Smashing Magazine or A List Apart it is miniscule, but it’s hard to find any complaints when you can generate 60,000+ pageviews in just 14 days. Five articles were written during this time period and as you can see the first article about Smashing Magazine was the most popular.
The fifth article, You Are Not A Designer, I Am Not A Musician looks like it will be the second most popular over time. It is no coincidence that these two articles also have the most tweets.
An issue that I experience and I’m sure many of you do as well is that when you have one of your articles do well, you want all of them to reach the same success. You fall into the mentality of trying to hit every ball out of the park, but in most cases this just isn’t realistic. That is a short term mentality that you need to get rid of. The long term goals for Drawar are to make it a great community for designers and when there is an article published it meets a standard that I have set. Sometimes the articles resonate with the public and sometimes they don’t, but I like to think they are all consistent in sticking with the goals of the site.
The long term goals of the site are much more important than what can happen in the short term and as site owners we would do well to keep this in mind. The feedback I have received through comments on the articles and on Twitter only help to reinforce this idea.
What do I like about the above numbers? I like the average time on the site. It makes me think that people are taking their time when they get here instead of taking a glance and leaving. If Drawar was on the front page of Digg then this number would be much lower as that traffic is known to not read what they are actually clicking on.
I wanted to be sure to post these numbers because many sites like to fabricate their traffic for advertisers. Most sites would claim 26,000 visitors if they had these numbers when in reality the site had 18,000 uniques which is what advertisers are more interested in. Even this number probably isn’t accurate as a unique might be just for a 24 hour period, but it is what I can show and it is definitely more accurate than the overall visits to the site.


No surprise here seeing how this is a site for designers and developers. I know a lot of companies that would beg to have their IE usage at 3%.

I am not sure if I should be surprised or not at these numbers, but I’m sure Apple would be pleased to see them. I think the most surprising thing to me is that the iPhone beats Linux. Might be time to consider an iPhone version of the site already!
Not much to go into with the other stats, but I have posted more below so you can draw your own conclusions. As time goes on I would like to do more of these traffic posts with a deeper analysis as I make changes to the site. For now though I can only hope that it has encouraged you to produce the best content you can because it really does pay off if you stick with it. I won’t go into how you also have to bust your ass marketing your content and making sure people know about it. People don’t magically just find the site.




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