Pictures of exciting times

In the spirit of pushing the barriers of the photographic art form, and going places more conventional photographers fear to tread, this week’s instalment of Billo’s Photos will not contain any photos. Take that Annie Leibowitz.

No, instead of showing off some dazzling photos from the week just been, and coming up with some insightful observations, I have decided to shine a spot light into the inner workings of how the blog works. I also get to combine this with my other passion – statistics!

“Statistics can be used to prove anything Kent; fourteen percent of people know that”

SO, when I signed up with this rollercoaster ride back in March I also signed up to Google Analytics, it’s another great free product from Google which allows you to keep track of all sorts of things regarding your website or blog. Here are a few high level stats to get things started, don’t worry, I’ll be going into more detail later on:

* 752 visits so far resulting in 1,099 page views (when your whole site is basically one long page you wouldn’t expect page views to be much higher than visits)

* 349 unique visitors – I don’t know who all you people are but thanks for stopping by!

* Average time on site 1 minute 10 seconds. Can’t read too much into this as I suspect a good number of viewings were just confirming I still hadn’t updated it.

* Most hits in 1 day was on April 8 when I announced to the world via email and facebook that this baby was live and 31 of you stopped by to kick the tyres. A bit disconcerting that once everyone saw what it was all about this lofty total hasn’t been reached again, although I did get a total of 41 hits over 2 days after last week’s long overdue update which was encouraging.


I’ve got loads of other info on what browsers people use to access the site (65% Explorer, 27% Firefox and 4 visits with Seamonkey, whatever that is?) but that’s not all that interesting.

What is slightly more interesting is where people are accessing the site from. As expected the big 2 are UK and Australia with 289 and 254 hits respectively, we’ve got USA a clear third with 128 visits with the vast majority coming from New York (is that you Brian?) although 19 states are represented. Some of the more unusual and unexpected visits have come from Colombia, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Slovenia, Latvia, Chile, India, Poland and the Czech Republic – especially unexpected as I don’t think I know anyone living in these countries! All up there are 27 countries who can proudly lay claim to its residents viewing the majesty of simonbills.com.

Now, onto the interesting stuff. Most of the visits come from direct hits, ie, typing simonbills.com into the address bar in your browser (or clicking the bookmark you’ve all no doubt made to speed up the process by 1.4 seconds), however my friends over at Google have sent a bit of business my way by people searching for the following things:

* “Live East Die Young” – this one brings more traffic than any other search, 14 visits to be precise. I’ve since done my own google search of this phrase and discovered I’m on the first page of the results which would explain things.



* “Pictures of punks in Camden” – 4 searchers have found their way into my world by searching for this phrase. I’ve also received some traffic from “Camden Punks”, “Punk’s pictures Camden 2008” (if I can figure out a way to block people with bad grammar I will), “punks in Camden photos”, “recent photos of punks in Camden” and even a typo “punks in cambden” which means that I must also have the same typo on my site. Ooops.


* Speaking of typo’s I’m google’s NUMBER ONE RESPONSE for the search “Mini pojects”. I think typos are the way forward actually, if you spell things correctly you get lost in the sea of other literate web nerds, but by misspelling certain important things you’re likely to come up much higher in google rankings for cretins.

* There are practical ones “backlighting for photos”, and “photos from sigma 10-20”

* Some precise ones “bride walking down the isle (sic) and groom comes out late”

* Some exciting ones “pictures of exciting times” and “exciting photos”

* Disturbing ones “picasa- webalbum young kids” and “picasa-webalbum young boys”

* A self indulgent one “beardvember Gerhard”

* And at least one particularly unusual one “picture of jigs white smoke”

My challenge to you, faithful readers, is to see how obscure you can make a search and have it lead to my blog. Go ahead, make my day.

Oh, and the other reason I elected to fly in the face of convention and post a photoless update is because the only photo I took this week was of the TV we’re looking to sell, and there really wasn’t any artistic merit to this (let me know if you’re in the market for a tele by the way, a lovely 32 inch Sony number, not a plasma or LCD but a very nice picture and excellent sound - £100).

Quick update on last week's post- we gave the couple a slideshow last night and it went down very well, they mentioned that in the end there were 760 guests that turned up. Insanity.