Potter Predictions After One Week
Well, it's been exactly a week since I started work on Potter Predictions.
From a development point of view, it's been a big success. I was able to design, implement and deploy everything within 72 hours. Since then I've added numerous features, all of which have been straightforward to implement on top of the existing framework.
So after a week, there are 279 users who have cast 15,078 votes on 154 public predictions. Twice that number of predictions have been submitted, many of which have been rejected as duplicates, some of which I still need to moderate.
Google Analytics suggests there have been 19,361 page views in 1,507 visits from 1,274 unique visitors staying an average of 5 minutes 12 seconds per visit. That means around 22% of visitors sign up for an account.
I paid for Google Adwords for "harry potter predictions" and that yielded 121 clicks from 24,178 impressions on the search page and 475 clicks from 720,224 impressions on the content network. So it appears around half of the unique visitors came from Google Adwords.
In terms of number of users, I have mixed feelings. Things got off to a good start: 100 users on the first day. Another 100 on the second. But then things started to drop off: 50 new users on Friday, 20 new users on Saturday and today is shaping up to only add 10 new users.
A post to alt.fan.harry-potter clearly didn't yield many new users. And my dream of making one of the big Harry Potter sites (which likely would have garnered thousands more visitors, if not users) has not yet come to pass.
But it's hopefully been fun for the users so far. And will be equally so in about a week when the site starts to contain the "answers" to the predictions.
The other nice thing is that the code is reusable, not only for other prediction sites (which I plan to use it for) but also for a number of other sites I have planned in the not-to-distant future. Stay tuned!
UPDATE : It's appropriate that the one week anniversary of one of my more successful (for its age) websites is also the two year anniversary of the framework that made it possible.
Comments (3)
James Tauber on July 16, 2007:
I've now made it possible to vote on predictions without being logged in. Of course, the votes aren't stored so if you want to compare your votes to those of others, you'll still need to sign in.
Regarding your last point, it's up to others to get the del.icio.us, reddit and digg votes up :-)
And I did submit to some of the major HP fan websites but haven't had any luck yet (still hoping there's just a backlog of news)
Doug Napoleone on July 16, 2007:
You should add the widgit to the main page to get those who know about the site to digg it.
http://digg.com/tools/integrate#2
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Last Modified: July 15, 2007
Author: jtauber
phil hassey on July 15, 2007:
- don't require users to create a signin, just have it immediately go to a page where the top 10 most broad predictions are there (like on most quiz sites) .. and have that page be a form where they can vote immediately.
- have those results be html pastable into peoples journals, etc - with a link "click here to vote on these and compare my votes to my friends" (making your site "viral")
- have most all other features still be available w/o a signin, but if someone wants to create an account to do "advanced stuff" don't require an e-mail address
- get it mentioned on more blogs / get it digg'd .. contact some of the major HP fan websites