One Month Of Anonyming
This experiment is a month old. Without any promotion, our few visitors have helped get the site looking active and offered some solid critique. I’ve made some small changes to the design, added and edited rules, and we’ve dealt with our first troll.
Design
Based on input I’ve made some basic changes. The borders were too high contrast and looked heavy. With a darker background they provide more of an natural transition, looking more like frames than borders. I also added a light texture to the background to enhance contrast.
I made a few fonts more prominent to better distinguish elements. The post titles and tags are primary navigation and needed to pop more. I think it makes the site more usable.
Traffic and search
- We had 224 unique visitors, 1653 page views, and a relatively high average of 5.5 minutes on the site.
- About 43% of the traffic was from France.
- We were quickly #1 for ‘anonyming’ on Google, and just today Google added subpages to the listing.
- 38% of traffic was mobile.
Posting
There were 12 user posts, not by me, that weren’t deleted. All of them seemed to get the spirit of the site and helped populate the site with relevant content.
There were also a number of deleted posts and comments from one or more trolls. While that might actually be the most interesting thing for me to share, trolls can’t be worth mentioning or they quickly are.
What next?
Before I take that ‘beta’ tag off I still have some tinkering to do under the hood. And I’m thinking about re-skinning the site entirely to make it look more contemporary.
I’m not yet convinced that the concept has much appeal, or that my design skills are selling it. But I’m going to keep poking at it and letting people know about it until it’s clear that it’s just not clicking with anyone.
It would help a great deal to find someone with an audience who really does get it. I think there is something unique about it and also maybe something useful or even important. I built it because I wanted it, and I can’t be alone.