Reliable Answers Hits 10 Million
It's a pleasure to announce that ReliableAnswers.com had our 10-millionth page view Wednesday,
April 16, 2008. We have been providing our free services and information now for approximately 10
years, initially under one of those 'free' hosts, until July 2000 when we moved to our own domain.
We have been in the top ten results for dozens of keyword searches in various search engines for
the last eight years, and our volume continues to grow exponentially.
We've developed our site with the idea that content on the Internet should always remain. We have
never simply removed content even if it became untimely or no longer as important as it once was.
To that end, we've removed less than a half-dozen pages on our entire site (which currently consists
of over one-thousands pages). I think that's a pretty good average.
Various parts of the site - particularly the 'news' and 'articles' listings - are updated several
times per day. Updates are dynamic and can be aggregated in the RSS aggregator of your choice.
We are able to mine certain data from our log files and statistics.
As an example, the most popular page on the site is "my favorites"
(/favorites.asp) - with a total of approximately
14.39% of all hits.
The second and third-highest volume pages are the Microsoft Visual Basic Download
directory (/vb/msvbdl.asp)
with 10.31%, and Annette's Favorites (/annette/favorites.asp)
with 8.21%. The most popular file downloads are the two first Project Dogwaffle Tutorials
(/pd/) with 5.24% and 3.72% of all
file downloads, respectively.
At any given point in time we have an average of 92 visitors on the site, and usually
one of those is a search engine re-indexing our content. At one point we had 23,948 people
on the site at one time (January 14, 2006), which was within two hours of posting several
barcode, registry and system monitoring samples on various online development groups.
Apparently self-promotion works.
ReliableAnswers.com usually receives between 6 and 12 thousand page views each day depending
on the day of the week. Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays are quite busy, while Sundays are the
slowest days for the site. The first week of the month is always the busiest, while the third
week tends to be slowest.
We did not accept any paid advertising on our site for the first 5 years (well,
we did barter for some Laszlo's Smoked Salmon for a while), and only started accepting
ads using Google's AdSense service three years ago. Initially we were anything but impressed -
Google was linking to many sites that we wholeheartedly did not agree with - and did not
provide us a means of filtering them from the ad listings.
This has since been resolved.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you, our reader, for making ReliableAnswers.com a
success. Our appreciation for the contributors and everyone who has provided valuable feed-back
cannot be stated enough. It's been a pleasure getting to know new people and seeing this website
take on a life of its own.
As always, there's still a lot to do. On that note - I'd better get back to work. ;)
Warm Regards,
Shawn K. and Annette M. Hall
Updated (April 19, 2008)
