This month we saw our traffic sky rocket as Stardock merged their skin library with ours as a way to cut costs and make things easier for users.
This has had quite an impact on the application sections here. For instance, Th etop 3 Litestep themes got over 100 downloads yesterday. This ironically makes the place where the most Litestep themes are currently being downloaded. Other apps listed here have received a similar boost.
Overall, the site was visited by over 580,000 *unique* people this month. This put WinCustomize into the top 100 websites that Hitbox currently carries and into the top 5 in its category. Our category includes Simtel -- one of the biggest file download sites in the world and we're catching up on them.
Referals are still very important. But this month, 70% of users came here from book marks or manually typed in the WC URL.
Out of the referals, Stardock made up 64% of them. Amongst the reamining:
Deviant Art: 1.6%
LS2K: .66%
LotsOfSkins: .46%
Customize.org: 41%
Customize.org must have really returned with a bang to have that good of a stat for the month. I suspect when the auto-community link generator kicks in on the 1st that Customize.org will be one of the 5 links randomly chosen (By referrals) for Sept.
All this growth, as you can imagine, comes at a cost. That cost primarily being bandwidth. If you find this site useful, we ask that you support the site by purchasing a shirt or CD or something. It goes to pay for the bandwidth that is used to deliver skins to you.
https://www.wincustomize.com/store.asp
In August we added T-shirts and other goodies to the store which helped get the site to 30% of its goal towards paying for its part of the bandwidth (we have until December to get to 100% each month or we'll lose some of our bandwidth). 30% is up from the 26% in July so we're getting better. We'll keep you up to date on how things progress. The shirts are really inexpensive and really high quality (wearing one now as I type this).
And finally, we should all thank our tireless moderators without whom this site would come to a screaching hault:
The Web goddess of WinCustomize: Alexandrie. She's been working behind the scenes making the site better and faster all month.
The code lord:
T-man. He's been putting in all sorts of overtime to put in features to make the site easier and more useful.
The Moderators:
Jafo, DavidK, Treetog, Migeleto, and others have been working very hard to keep those skin submissions being made available in a timely fashion.
Things are rolling along well. In September we hope to add polls to the website and possibly a way to integrate your Stardock.net account (if you have Object Desktop or Drengin.net) into your WinCustomize account so you can manage all your "stuff" from a single interface. Plus the WinCustomize skin browser may show up in beta next month.
Thanks for visiting our site!
