I was quietly chuffed this morning to go into Google Analytics and find that, for the first time, there had been over 5,000 visits to this website in the previous month.  Very small beer compared with commercial sites, but still encouraging numbers.  It's a nice coincidence that the blog went live on 9th October 2008, exactly two years ago.

I have gradually been accumulating the "Handouts, questionnaires & other leaflets" in the "Good knowledge" section of the site for many years.  The blog went live in the autumn of '08, although I had been quietly writing posts (but not making them available on the internet) since January 2008.  This meant that when I went live in October there was already a good deal of material available for site visitors to explore.  The first post was entitled "Commonsense isn't common" and that January's posts were a mix of comments on stress, health & wellbeing much as they have continued to be since.  Stress-focused posts that initial month included "Helping adolescents suffering with depression" and "Both negative & positive emotions can be functional or dysfunctional".  Health-focus included "Does healthy lifestyle really make a difference?" and "Drink lots of water: an urban myth", while more wellbeing-orientated posts were on "Sonja Lyubomirsky and 'The how of happiness'" and "Savouring - initial thoughts".  I've written approximately ten to a dozen posts monthly since - so there's an archive of 350 or so posts on this site.  The "Tag cloud" and "Search box" provide ways of exploring what's available.  

Analytics tells me the site has had 61,462 visits over the last two years - 21,402 in the first year & 40,060 in the second.  The average visitor has opened four different pages on the site and stayed for about four minutes.  Visitors have come from 151 countries - the top 10 being the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Philippines, India, New Zealand, Germany & the Netherlands.  It's been interesting to review all this at the blog's second anniversary.   

And revisiting this post towards the end of October, hits have already gone up to over 5,500 visits in the last month.  Good ...

I revisited this topic again when the site had been live for three years - see "Update on website traffic: nearly a quarter of a million page views last year".