Nathan Exposed: the naked truth about my gay life

SiteMeter, a website statistics tracker, was arguably the most popular, most used tracker by bloggers. With a customer base of 30 Million, I liked it because it was so easy to use. I realize there are much deeper, more in depth options out there, including ones from Google, but I just liked SiteMeter because it was simple.

Today they rolled out a new version that has bloggers seeing red. It’s crammed with tiny scrolling boxes, most of which can’t even fit the content. It uses slow, clunky Flash media that seems to serve no purpose. There are much better, faster loading technologies available.

I can’t figure the damn thing out, and I’d like to believe I’m a pretty smart cookie since I’m a website designer by profession.

Many of you probably remember that just a month ago, SiteMeter took down many big name websites when they attempted to upgrade their software, only to run into a bug that made sites unusable for anyone using IE 6. The downtime lasted almost all weekend, and the company didn’t even respond publicly until it was over.

With this new version, which has received negative reviews from pretty much every single user, I’m afraid this may be the death of SiteMeter as we know it.

As a web designer, the best advice I can give is to always test a re-design on a focus group before it goes public. It’s been a good run, guys.

UPDATE: After a shitstorm in bloggerland, SiteMeter has announced they are rolling back to the old version. Their main site is completely down, with no message or anything. This all comes less than 8 hours since the new system launched. I feel kind of bad for them because I know how crushing it is when a new design flops. But in this case, I have to say a company that services 30 Million+ websites should have released a beta test first.

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Sun, Sep 14, 2008 @ 11:34 am | Filed in Blogs | Permalink 1 Comment

    Sad news - I have used Sitemeter from the beginning but most recently rely more on the Wordpress stats. It’s too bad when a company that was once so strong dies a slow death from bad management, etc.

    Posted by DanNation on Sun, Sep 14, 2008 @ 3:25 pm

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