Statistics
Our web host provides us with raw statistics of how our site was accessed. We run them through a program which lets us observe trends. How many visits did we have? How many unique visitors? How did they find us? How long did they stay? (Don't worry. As explained in our Policies, we do not keep individual information. We do not know that Jane Tailor visited three times from a .edu host and spent 45 minutes viewing How to Make Gloves.)
Some interesting, amusing, and bemusing items from our stats that we would like to share:
- Top five search phrases
- Unexpected search phrases
- Top five referrers (other than search engines)
- Visitors from around the world
- Bandwidth milestones
Top five search phrases used to find our site in the last six months:
April 2006 —
- how to make hats
- vintage sewing
- dress patterns
- making hats
- tweed
March 2006 —
- how to make hats
- vintage sewing
- dress patterns
- tweed
- gabardine
February 2006 —
- how to make hats
- vintage sewing
- vintagesewing.info
- gabardine
- dress design
January 2006 —
- how to make hats
- vintage sewing
- woman silhouette
- beret pattern
- gabardine
December 2005 —
- how to make hats
- vintage sewing
- how to make bows
- tweed
- beret pattern
November 2005 —
- how to make hats
- woman silhouette
- vintage sewing
- bonnet pattern
- tweed
Unexpected search phrases:
Many of our visitors spend under 30 seconds on our site. Some find what they are looking for and leave; others realize they don't have time to look around, so they bookmark us and return later. Others were clearly looking for something else entirely. Here are some of the more out-of-place search phrases (except one or two truly scary ones). Do you suppose they ever found what they were looking for?
- "how to make a nose taller"—An interesting concept. They didn't find the answer, though they looked for it in the 1928 Nu-Way Course in Millinery and Hat Design.
- "pictures women shrunk by a shrink machine" —As opposed to women shrunk by a washing machine? They landed in the 1936 Home Sewing Course.
- "home made outer space costumes"—Were they startled to end up in the 1930 Paris Frocks at Home?
- "where to buy single edge gem razor blades" —They had to dig through many, many, many pages of results and landed in the 1936 Home Sewing Course. Were they in an unshaven stupor, blindly clicking every link?
- "how does wearing certain type of clothes effect your mile time" —Surprisingly, we were the second result in Google: 1926 Nu-Way Course in Fashionable Clothes-Making. I hope they figured out the difference between "effect" and "affect" and were able to find a useful answer to their question.
- "disadvantage of soot and dust being added to the air to reflect sun light"—Again, we were on the first page of results in Google, landing them in the 1931 Laundering and Dry Cleaning.
Top five referrers (other than search engines):
Most of our visitors arrive directly (by bookmark or by typing "VintageSewing.info" in their browser's address bar) or through a search engine. A slowly growing number, however, are being referred by other sites. We wish to acknowledge these sites for helping our users find our site.
August 2004—
Visitors from around the world:
Our stats report visitors from a surprising number of countries (we'll spare you the list, unless enough of you request it), but even more gratifying, we have noticed links to our site (excluding search engines) from sites based in:
- .ca —Canada
- .de —Germany
- .lt —Lithuania
- .ru —Russia Federation
- .se —Sweden
Bandwidth milestones
In March 2004, we had over a million hits and exceeded our 15GB monthly allotment. (Yes, we realize "hits" are comparatively meaningless as a measure of traffic, but it was a cool milestone to reach.)
In May 2004, we again exceeded our bandwidth and discovered our former host simply shuts sites down instead of contacting the owner to authorize payment. We were shut down for four days. We now have a new host.
