Pictures-of-Cats.org Diary

This is an entry in the Pictures-of-Cats.org Diary. I thought I'd start to diarise the building and maintenance of the www.pictures-of-cats.org website. For all budding website builders this might have some value.

I've been building for about 18 months now. I work on the site each day and try and build at least one page a day. With the Blogger site I can build more quickly so it works about at nearer 2-3 sometimes. Some of the major pages can take several days to build.

What is the overriding sentiment that I have after working on the www.pictures-of-cats.org website for 18 months? This is it: it is hard, very hard to increase the number of visitors. The site is doing well. It get more traffic (per Alexa) than the Cat Fanciers Association website, for example. It gets more than www.messybeast.com, for example. There are a few (perhaps 2 or 3) cat websites that get more traffic in the world, yet I would like more and this is proving a challenge.

At a certain point attracting more traffic gets harder. You get a fairly steep curve and then it plateaus out. The most important personal characteristic in website building is persistence, no doubt about it.

The current Alexa ranking is about 110K. The current page views are hard to calc. but according to SBI it is somewhere in the order of 3-400,000 per month. It may be a lot more as SBI doesn't measure this Blogger site for page views. SBI tells me I get about 4,000 unique visitors per day to the main website to which I could perhaps add 1-2,000 for the Blogger site.

I am currently working on a page about cat head shape, having just finished a page on cat body types. These are, in a way, specialist areas about the workings of cat fancy people, people who are involved in showing top quality purebred but still of interest to those of us who like cats.