Sunday, September 14, 2008

[sitemeter] if it ain't broke, don't fix it


Exceedingly peeved by Sitemeter and it illustrates the veracity of a basic rule of life:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Sitemeter once had a viewable, clear graphic representation of what the blogger needed. I always looked at the bar graph of how many uniques there'd been the last week, then the list of referrals to see if there was someone I'd missed visiting, then country share.

Quick, clear, taking a minute or two.

Now thay've gone all techartyfarty, with slick gunmetal boxes too small to view, superimposed stats and a distinctly cold feel to it all. They couldn't leave well enough alone, Sitemeter. In the name of Ever Onwards and Upwards, they've blown it like Brown's government. It seems whatever such people touch, they ruin.

This does not even take into account the difficulty in 'migrating', as they call it, failing to recognize passwords and emails and so on and so on.

Not good enough, Sitemeter and as I put in my contact with you just now, seriously thinking of moving to another meter service after all this time with you.

18 comments:

  1. I have moved to Google Analytics. I much prefer it.

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  2. I never really understood Sitemeter at the best of times....

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  3. Sometimes simpler is better. How much about your visitors do you really need to know unless you are obsessional or delusional about statistics and uniques and the like. I am not.

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  4. I totally agree with you James- the new Sitemeter is a disaster.

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  5. Agree entirely. What a load of rubbish.

    If I had the money and energy I'd start a software company that guaranteed not to change anything for 10 years...

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  6. The new Site Meter is a disaster. Google Analytics is good for what it is, which is not the quick 1-minute overview of recent visitors.

    Clicky is an alternative, but it's not as efficient as the old Site Meter.

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  7. Statcounter is good for a quick overview. It is worth checking out and is free, so you could add the code to your page and see if you like it.

    It helped me find all sorts of interesting things about visits to my PCS site!

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  8. What a disaster - I run a group blog that gets about 20k visits a day. I use Google Analytics for a monthly overview, but sitemeter provided a way for all my authors to quickly check their traffic every day. AND it was the only way for me to get an up to the minute view on where and when a traffic surge was coming from. But now, it seems unable to fulfill that function.

    I looked at statcounter but that only seems to offer a daily graph. We desperately needed an hourly one - anyone have any recommendations?

    *Grumble* I'd willingly pay $30 a month to get the old version back.

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  9. (BTW my overall sitemeter ranking is 503, which I'm assuming means I'm about their 500th biggest site out of 1 million or so users. I would have thought they might have given their top .05% of sites a better heads up on this before they changed it.)

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  10. Oh dear, I have I still have to face the conversion. I wonder if I can remember my password, I hope I wrote it down somewhere.

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  11. I'm dropping out of Sitemeter now. I've written a letter of protest first and will see how that goes. I've had an auto-reply so far.

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  12. I guess it's not just us:

    Good Afternoon, We have received and heard your feedback concerning the latest changes to the website. We will implementing a rollback to the website immediately. We will also be responding to each of your support requests as soon as possible. If you have any questions please let us know. Sincerely ...

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  13. What an utter fiasco.

    Fair play to Sitemeter for understanding the scale of the disaster and swiftly correcting the damage.

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  14. JMB: I forgot my password, or so it seems, because I entered it and my email address, and I was told my username did not match. As I was not asked for Jailhouselawyer, I am not surprised.

    Good news...

    "We are in the process of rolling back SiteMeter to the former system.
    SiteMeter should be back online soon.
    Please check back later.
    Sorry for inconvenience.

    Sincerely, SiteMeter Support Team".

    Like James said, if it's not broken why try to fix it?

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  15. Dear Valued SiteMeter Customers,

    As you’re no doubt aware by now, we’ve chosen to roll back our website to the previous “classic” version.

    Based on some performance issues we were experiencing along with feedback from the community it appears we have pushed our new site live prematurely.

    Our intention is and has always been to offer you, our customer’s better tools and more accurate data. Obviously we fell short of this. The first thing we need to do, moving forward, is to roll out new product releases in parallel to our current platform. This will give everyone a chance to try out, evaluate, and comment on our new concepts.

    We would also like to take this opportunity to ask those of you who had issues or concerns with the new site to participate in future beta testing. We had originally asked for Beta Tester in two of our newsletters sent earlier this year so we’re eager to build our beta group even larger. If you’re interested in participating please send us an email using our support ticketing system with BETA TESTER in the subject line of your email.

    In the near term we’ll be evaluating the performance issues and feedback from our community. If you have additional input that would help us build you a better product we’d like to hear from you.

    We apologize for the botched rollout and will do our best to make sure the next time we do this it has your full support and blessing.

    Sincerely,
    The SiteMeter Team

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  16. Give them credit - smart move, and smart to engage in blog comments. They just turned me back into a fan.

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  17. Well, well, well - wonders never cease. Are they for real this time?

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