- By Mike Caro | Exit
Entry #9 (2010-06-02)I greatly appreciate your early visits to the new Poker1 site.
Frankly, we weren’t anticipating that so many of you would drop by to watch P1 being built. Although we’re now about 55 percent functional (a rough estimate), most of the key pages and features remain to be implemented.
Progress
It’s time to deliver a progress report to you. As you might have noticed, I’m sharing our actual development documents (a change log and a daily to-do list) through links on the home page. Two long-time developers have already told me that this is a bad idea, because people don’t want to be reminded of glitches and problems being worked out behind the scenes. But I believe this helps build our family.
You see, this isn’t a typical web site. Ever since I became a hermit in the Ozarks, I’ve wanted to be able to share my life, my thoughts, and my teachings without leaving this serenity and isolation. Thus the new Poker1. So, why shouldn’t you know exactly what’s happening? How does it hurt? It might seem unprofessional by common web development standards, but so what? This is my only link to you, and I don’t want it to seem mysterious.
So, here’s where we stand as of today.
I’ve personally been adding content. Diane McHaffie, Mike Caro University of Poker’s director of operation, also adds content daily. Additionally, I’ve taken over the task of development, including all PHP programming, XHTML and CSS creation, and more. That’s because the old Poker1 site was left to the hands of a professional development team who accidentally added code that broke the functionality. I wasn’t able to administer my own site or add content for five years. I’m never going to let that happen again.
Stubborn
So, here I am, deep in the forest, doing it all myself — with the assistance of Diane and visitors who have generously pointed out glitches, such as Thomas Foster, Michael Hand, and others. Paint me stubborn, but this is my design (not popular with web designers) and my vision. You’ve always known I was weird, right?
We’re planning to announce a grand opening on September 1. It’s possible that date might get pushed back, but I’m still hopeful. You’ll always be kept informed of changing plans.
Meanwhile, our only announcements (other than mentions that I’m rebuilding the site in columns) have been: (1) Daily tweets pointing to selected entries from Twitter; (2) daily messages about the same content from Facebook; (3) a limited test of Google Adwords. Since I haven’t yet got around to developing pages on Twitter or Facebook, we’re not getting full “value” there.
Poker1 traffic during development
Anyway, here’s a report on current traffic.
We opened up the site without fanfare on March 16, so anyone wishing to witness our progress and mistakes could do so.
We had 716 visits that same day, probably generated through word-of-mouth curiosity. (There were 13 visits the previous day. Most likely those were associated with development efforts.) On March 30, we had 859 visits (the highest for the month — low for post-public opening was 595 two days earlier). We had anticipated an average of 200 visits per day during the development phase.
Total site visits (16 days): 22,132 prorated (11,423 actual)
High day: 859 (March 30)
Low day: 593 (March 22 — except for 15th and earlier)
Total page visits (16 days): 87,716 prorated (45,273 actual)
Total site visits: 30,486
High day: 1,895 (April 12)
Low day: 799 (April 2)
Total page visits: 97,489
In May, we began with 847 visits on the 1st and haven’t been under 1,000 in the 31 days since (including June 1).
Total site visits: 42,153
High day: 3,461 (May 25)
Low day: 847 (May 1)
Total page visits: 175,206
June began with 1,406 site visits yesterday (5,601 page visits)
Remaining tasks before grand opening
Here is our in-house, unedited to-do list of what still needs to happen before we can announce our grand opening…
So, now you’re up to date. — MC
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For a momenty there I thought something was definitely wrong with my monitor. I was not seeing any colors on the website. Hehe… I realized after a few seconds that it’s all done in gray. Quite a unique color scheme I must say! :D
Hi, Mike —
Hope you adapt to the gray-scale and that your monitor enjoys a long, productive life.
Thanks for making your first comment and joining our Poker1 family.
Straight Flushes,
Mike Caro