I've never been one that likes to 'toot' my own horn, especially publicly. I came across some interesting data this morning that made me want to post up somewhere, so here it is.

My current employer had me re-build their website using Drupal starting from day 1. I've been there for 2 years this coming August. The site was completed on September 1st, 2008. It was a large project that took nearly 8 months (not full days) to complete. It was a huge milestone for the college to have a new and improved website that delivered the information to the public. There were many praises from the faculty and staff here, and as a whole the site was accepted. I was even able to post a Case Study on Drupal's website for the community to pick apart. I got some good feedback through this case study and hopefully helped others in my same situation.

Well, here we are about 6 months later and I came across a site that showed me some information that I've been curious about for a while. The site is called Compete, and, in a nutshell, it will compare site analytics between different sites. Being the competitive person that I am I decided to punch in a few of the other ATC's (Applied Technology College) in Utah and see how we compared. All of the ATC's belong to an organization and aren't "technically" competing, but sometimes it's fun to see how we compare. This is what I found:

One thing that really jumped out to me in this graph was the huge jump that took place right when our site launched. The prior months of that year we were averaging 2-4k unique visitors and all of the sudden hit 12k when the new site launched! Now it's hard to say how reliable the data is, but off of first glance I would say that it's pretty accurate compared to some of the Google Analytics reports that I've been getting.

What do I have to attribute this success to? First off, I would have to say that Drupal is playing a HUGE part in this due to it SEO friendliness and ease of use. The set-up of our new site in comparison to the old one is reason enough for the hits to go up. A more simplified and user-friendly navigation has definitely helped. Secondly, we had a team of about 3-4 people (including myself) doing the research to see what we had to do to make our site most effective. Lastly, there are probably a number of modules that have made a huge impact to the site (listed below). Thanks, Drupal!

And here are the currect statistics:

As a disclaimer I'm not really sure how accurate this data is, so take it with a grain of salt. All I know is that the data reflects the data that I've seen in Google Analytics for us. I'll be keeping an eye on it in the near future to see if it continues to be accurate compared to my data.