I just noted that I don’t have a traffic rank for 3-months on Alexa at the moment, but I recorded a daily traffic rank:
Yesterday 1 wk. Avg. 3 mos. Avg. 3 mos. Change
78,860 110,773 — up 2,465,450

This is the first time I ever recorded a daily stat. I’m very puzzled why. It’s still stated at the top of the page (740,860). Perhaps Alexa is updating its stats as we speak.

edited: I checked Alexa again, and it seems that my top line score is unchanged at the moment, but I have moved under 100,000 ranking for the first time. Other top websites no longer have 3 months’ ranking, just daily and weekly. That’s what my website has right now.

While there are many criticisms of Alexa, and how it can be manipulated, in the absence of any other 3rd-party reasonable medium for monitoring and reporting website success, I’ll stick with Alexa, Technorati and Google right now. I haven’t tried to manipulate Alexa at all, even though there are ways to do that. I’d prefer to just blog and promote the ‘old-fashioned’ way. It’s more fun!

When I started my first websites, it was always a challenge to get the site up and running. My first pages were so ugly it was amazing. I hadn’t got a clue about HTML or anything like that. There was no such thing as a blog, nor PHP. At least, if there were, I didn’t know about them!
The web has grown much more sophisticated since 1997 when I was playing with Geocities, and considerably less expensive, too.

So when a site like SiteProPlus which offers to do Wesite Design for free as well as provide hosting, it is hard to stop staring at the website and wonder what madness now possesses the engineers at SiteProPlus!

Their rationale, however, is quite sane, if a little zany. The design is a kind of store loss leader for their hosting services. People are attracted by the special offer, then find themselves signing up for the hosting services at the same time.

This solution would be ideal for people who are very busy running their own business or consultancies but don’t have a big budget or time or skill to oversee the nitty gritty details of website maintenance.

I have three suggestions for this company that they should take note of:

1. Please check your spelling on the front page: how can you claim to do design when the first thing a visitor sees is “…Finally it’s easy to get a professional loonkng website design online fast”

2. Do not hide your pricing or the features that your hosting includes. Your audience may not know that much about website hosting or design, but you still need to provide basic information on the pricing and features, including space and bandwidth, and anything else that might affect a site’s operation or cost.

3. It’s quite difficult to contact anyone. I tried to let you know about the huge spelling gaffe, but there was no contact form. And when I clicked on the link that offered live help, nothing worked.

Actually, these are issues that many companies on the internet face. I wouldn’t single them out particularly except that it is easy to lose customers with these three problems.

For those of you who are using a CMS/Blog for the first time, there are three significant differences from web 1.0 style websites (with static content) that you will notice:
1. a blog/CMS is a kind of evolving website, not static.

Content is added, commented on, edited and categorized. There are endless ways that a blog can be easily customized through themes, plugins, features, categories, and tweaks.
2. a blog/CMS has a hugely social dimension.

The commenting, pings, trackbacks, etc. are features that are central to the social sphere. The discussion is ongoing and can take place onsite, and offsite in Digg.com, Technorati or another of dozens of social websites.

3. separation of content and design.
The last and critical aspect that makes a blog/CMS owner happy is that the content and the design are largely separated, so you can work on one without worrying too much about the other: they take care of themselves.

These features and ease of use separate a blog/CMS from a traditional static website in a number of ways, but with the tools available, you’ll find it easy to create a much more unique environment for your readers, and you can drive a lot more traffic to your site. In other words, you get visitors!