One of my bad habits is to look at my stats way too much. I don’t know if it is work avoidance or just an addiction to numbers that are meaningless to just about everyone but myself. Since I once stared for an unremitting month at the option tables of CVX I must say that addiction had something to do with it. But this fascination for stats fosters another problem. I tend to focus on the bad stats. Then I set myself to work to correct the problems that caused them.

This sounds good, but I think I would be much better off by concentrating on the good stats and then working to make them better. A case in point: Last year about this time I created a series of home improvement sites for InDepthInfo (eight of them actually). Some did very well, and are pulling in good traffic and actually serving a purpose by clearly explaining how to do various home improvement projects. Some are doing middling, though just as well written. Others are laggards.

Now, what do you think that I would focus on? Well, the laggards, of course. I want all of the websites to do well. They are like my children. I tend to help the one who needs help the most when they need it. For this reason, I have recently begun to lavish attention on WallpaperHowTo. It is about what you would expect from me, a website about how to hang wallpaper. There is tolerable writing, good structure, drawings from my own hand, all bucked up by my own experiences wallpapering and writing.

I think it has lagged for two reasons. First, and I cannot fix this problem, it must compete with the home improvement topic, and then it confuses the search engines because there are so many sites out there that feature the kind of wallpaper that hangs on your computer screen. (As you can imagine, I have the same problem with my WindowHowTo website.) Second, it was one of the last of the batch of sites I created. For this reason, I did not do much to promote it. Usually, I will write to a few people to try to get links for it, maybe do a bit of work on directories, maybe write an article for one of the Ezine publishers. For WallpaperHowTo, I ended up doing this sporadically, if at all. I would rather be writing a new web page and leave that promotion stuff to someone else.

But I know that I cannot do this because there is no one else. So, as I stare at the stats, I see this poor website not doing as well as the others. I feel guilty because of past neglect and I set to work on it. For WallpaperHowTo I decided that a makeover was in order. The site was not W3C compliant, so I updated the format. I added an about page, a privacy page and even a “resource” page. I updated the few footnotes, and then I stewed over what to do next. All this took several hours.

My question to the reader, as well as myself is. Would it not have been smarter for me to have done the same thing to my drywall website which is doing so much better? An improvement in that website would undoubtedly pay me better because it is at that position in the search engines that a movement of one place up can mean hundreds of page views per day.

I like to believe that my head rules my activities. But I often find that this is not the case, especially when applied to my children…err websites.