09 September, 2008
- ArtWanted.com Staff
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- 27 Comments
ArtWanted.com - New vs. Old
On July 15th, ArtWanted.com launched a complete redesign of our website and over a dozen new features. The new ArtWanted.com website has been up for almost two months now, so we thought it would be interesting to share some of the stats/data we have collected as we compared the old site with the new site. We pulled a lot of numbers from our database and our statistics reports to compare the old site (in June 2008) with the new site (in Aug. 2008) to see how the two sites compared with each other. (We did not use any numbers in July, because we updated the site in the middle of that month.) Here is what we found:
New Members - The new site brought in 15% more members in Aug. than in June. We feel that the easier navigation and the new member feature overview page help bring in new members to the site.
Image Uploads - In Aug. we had 47% more images uploaded to ArtWanted.com than in June. The more images we have on the site, the larger the art community and more hits that are brought in to the site. This jump is mostly attributed to free members being able to upload more images. However, we noticed that even Premium members are uploading more images with the new site. This being said, the average number of images displayed on the daily upload page has not really changed, which should be good news for everyone. This is because the same number of members are uploading artwork as before, they are just uploading them directly to their own portfolio, which does not take away the exposure from all the other members of the site. NOTE: Only the first 3 images uploaded for each day are displayed on the 'daily uploads' page.
New Message Board Topics - We saw a 42% increase in the number of new message board topics made on our message boards with the new site. We also saw a 28% increase in the number of unique artists posting messages to the message boards. More and more members are using the message boards with the new site than before, which builds the ArtWanted.com community and friendships between members.
Image Comments & Image Hits - We did see a 17% decline in the number of comments posted on artwork and a 42% decline in image hits. However, both of these numbers were expected to drop due to some of the changes we made to the site and how image hits are recorded. These numbers are actually better than projected. In general, your artwork is being seen by about the same number of people as before, we are just not recording as many hits during the same user session as before. For the full details, read the following post.
Website Search Engines - The new website is better optimized for Search Engines and we saw a 4% increase in traffic from search engines with the new site. The more hits we get from search engines, the more hits everyone gets on their personal portfolios.
Website Pageviews - Our website logs show a 13% increase in website pageviews for the site. We also see a 16% jump in the number of pages each visitor is looking at during a visit to our site. These statistics mean that people that come to the new site are looking at more pages and artwork than before.
Time On Site - Our statistics also show that website visitors are staying on our site 10% longer than before, and our 'Bounce Rate' has dropped by 15%. Both of these numbers indicate that people are staying on our website longer with the new site than the old.
These numbers, along with other data we have collected, show a big improvement for the ArtWanted.com community due to the changes that were made in July. We recognize that these major changes caused a handful of bugs to pop-up on the site and some recent down-time has been seen, and we apologize for this. However, even with these issues, the data we have seen and user feedback we have read, points to a better site because of the changes that were made in July.
Our goal is to always make improvements to ArtWanted.com and we appreciate the feedback we have received on how we can do better. More improvements, better performance and new features are on their way! We appreciate all of our members and the community you have created for each other. Thank You!
