Luke ‘n’ Bill

One of my good friends called me the other day with an interesting problem. He has acquired the rights to work on the website www.lewisandclarktrail.com and now wants to know what he can do to it.

The site is really a gold mine of opportunity. Great domain name, great topic (not a passing fad that will be gone in 5 years), the site is overflowing with content (usually the hard part) and it already has a large amount of traffic going to it. We knew what the rough number was for unique users in a year but there had never been any analytics run on the site. So that was the first step.

After he had installed analytics on the site last Sunday the numbers started rolling in. It was really interesting to see what you can tell just by some statistics. The numbers backed up what we already knew about the site. It is visited primarily by school aged children visiting for school purposes. Here are some of the stats that really cemented that idea in my head:

• Site recieves an average of 700 unique visitors a day during the week. On the weekend, it averaged 300. Apparently these kids don’t like doing their homework on the weekends.
• The amount of visitors with high speed internet was above the average. The schools always have high speed internet even out in the sticks.
• The amount of visitors with monitors of either 1024×768 or 800×600 was staggering. There’s nothing wrong with those CRTs from 1999, so why throw them away?!

These were really quite interesting to look at and I think it really gave us a great idea of what we can do next and in addition to that, it will be interesting to see what happens to them when school is out and tourist season takes over.

Anyone feeling like doing some camping on the trail.

I read this article today about what has been caught by reading the specs on the new standard for CSS coming out.

It’s really an interesting idea.  I could definitely see myself  using them for the reasons they specify in the article but it is also interesting for the fact of what the next step might be.  I’ve always had a confused outlook on .CSS being that it’s really it’s own “language”, but it’s not really a “programming language” in the way that I usually think about it.

It’s already a very powerful tool and just recently realized I have no idea how I would build a site without the standard div/span/.css process that I use now.  (I know…cause I was asked to and had to ask another of our developers to do it instead)

Now though, the tool is getting even more powerful and it will really be interesting to see where they take it next.  In my mind, I would think the next logical step would be into logic switches and loops, but we’ll have to see.

The sad fact is you know that IE will only support 75% of this new functionality so you’ll still have to put in your IE hacks to make it work.

It may be the “punk rock” design put on the site or possibly my overly candid and risky conversation regarding RC Airplanes…or most likely my reference to a religious poop in the title of post talking about the Georgian UAV being shot down.

Whatever it was I have officially been blocked from the Skywest corporate headquarters by that handy internet filtering software.

Now lets see who else’s companies I can get red flagged from… guns, sex, drugs, communism, koala bears, terrorism.

There we go…that should about do it.  (by the way, thanks to Reid, my good friend that works at Skywest, for letting me know that I’m just too hardcore now…now quit browsing these dirty sites REID!)