Some time in the next twenty-four hours this site will receive its millionth unique visitor. From a grand perspective, the number isn’t terribly significant: plenty of sites receive that many visitors in a single day. But because it’s meaningful to me, I thought I’d use the opportunity to share some history and data.

A Brief History

I originally started this blog as demosthenes.info for my web development students, using content I had written on an intranet server. For the first two years, my students were the site’s primary audience: visitor rates plummeted during summer vacation.

My first real break came from an article linked by Smashing Magazine, after politely but persistently eMailing them for several months; I’m now a contributing editor there.

The Power Of An Audience

Passion for web design and development have remained my primary motivation: I’ve never run any advertising, never had a guest post, and very rarely write “listicles”. My students have been a source of constant inspiration: many of the articles are written in response to questions raised in class. That access to a constant live audience is an opportunity very few web developers have, and I’m very grateful for it.

By The Numbers

A few pieces of data:

• Canada was the greatest source of visitors at the beginning, but my adopted home is now in fourth place, well behind the United States, the UK, and India. This site has been visited by at least one person from every nation on Earth, with the exception of three countries in central Africa. One of my goals in the next redesign is to make the site fast and small enough for visitors from absolutely everywhere to use.
• Total number of articles: 835
• In its first year, this site had an average of 30 visitors a day. It’s now 3,500, regularly reaching a peak of 5,000.
• Most popular post:Which CSS Measurement To Use When
• The site’s design has been refreshed every year.
• Total number of comments, across all articles:1101. The vast majority of these were submitted after I moved the comment system to Disqus, one of the better decisions I’ve made.
• “New vs. returning” visitor rates are very high: 25% of visitors have previously looked at the blog.
• I’ve made posts to this blog from five different countries in the last four years.
• There is a constant revision process going on for existing articles, including corrections, code improvements, and updated links. Most web development articles have been rewritten at least once.

Onwards

I don’t ever intend to stop writing: I’m very much looking forward to posting my thousandth article sometime in the next year. I hope you’ll be reading then too.

Enjoy this piece? I invite you to follow me at twitter.com/dudleystorey to learn more.