Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

About six months ago I came up with the idea of setting up a blog to talk about all the creative and cultural things happening in Birmingham (UK), where I live. I’m a relatively busy man so I hooked up with Pete Ashton, blogger extraordinaire, who was thinking along similar lines so we got the thing off the ground - Created in Birmingham.

Since then I’ve been checking the web stats occasionally to see how it’s doing, but it was proving to be difficult to get a comparison against other sites in Birmingham - how well can you say your site is doing without knowing what to benchmark it against?

That’s when I found out about Alexa. It’s a search engine that has a few unique features, the best of which is a tool which lets you see where a website ranks in the world in terms of how much web traffic it gets. You can compare sites to see how important they are, as well as see a ranking of which sites are popular over time. So Yahoo is currently number 1 in the World followed closely by Google. And somewhere a long way down the list is Created in Birmingham, at 1.5millionth-ish in the World. Out of all the sites in the World, that’s not bad going….

Yesterday it struck me - wouldn’t it be great to see where the blog ranks when you compare it with other sites in Birmingham, so I made a quick script that pulled all of the links from the blog, asked Alexa what the ranking for each one was, and out popped the following list.

Unfortunately Alexa counts all of the views to sub-sections on websites as being to just that site, so Myspace pages, generic blogs (bogger.com, wordpress.com) and regional pages on big sites like the BBC and Channel 4 were skewing the results so I’ve removed them.

It makes interesting reading, especially when you think that some of the sites that are ranked lower than Created in Birmingham cost lots of money to make!

Perhaps this goes to prove that the old adage that Content is King still holds true, and if you’re considering buildin a new website that you should maybe follow the example of CIB and put significantly more into your content budget than your technical implementation or design budgets (in our case 0% on tech, 100% on content!)

Here’s the stats, low ranking indicate higher traffic, and the accuracy of the data decreases as the rankings get higher because the sample size decreases.

‘-’ indicates ‘no data’

I’m not sure what any of this means, but it’s interesting to see where the majority of traffic is going to. This list is by no means comprehensive - it’s just based on the list of sites that are on the blog along with a few that I have added in that I thought would be useful to weigh up against.

In conclusion - the blog looks like it’s growing healthily, it’s getting regular visits but more importantly it’s just plain _interesting_ - nice job Pete.