WPCandy Releases June Stats Report

THE INTERNET - Popular WordPress community site WPCandy announced their monthly stats report today, the first report after their June 2008 re-launch.

In the month since the site was re-designed, stats almost doubled May’s total page views. However, unique visitors were only slightly higher, meaning visitors were digging deeper into the site than before. This is likely due to the site’s new structure, which introduced four different sections to the site - Articles, Themes, Plugins, and SItes - and greatly improved navigation features.

Top referrers for the monthly period were PositiveSpaceBlog, a design and technology blog, Google Reader, and Stumbleupon. WPCandy also sponsored the first unofficial WordPress day, an event to both celebrate the existence of WordPress and to thank the creators of the popular, free, open-source blogging system. Both the new site introductory post and the WordPress Day post contributed heavily to the site’s impressive stats.

“Our stats have been pretty hawt,” said Michael Castilla, lead admin of WPCandy, during an interview. “It’s great to see that our visitors are enjoying the new site and are using it to its fullest potential.”

By the end of the month, WPCandy exceeded 2,000 feed subscribers, the highest total throughout the site’s history.

Popular articles included the WordPress Help Sheet, a guide to assist WordPress developers, the new site introductory post, the WordPress Day entry, and a collection article listing 10 plugins to improve the blogging system’s administration area.

“We’re quite excited with our stats, but we’re also hoping this is just a glimpse of what’s to come,” explained Dan Philibin, lead developer and author at WPCandy. “We’re hoping to roll out some new features really soon that should expand the site even more.”

WPCandy has quietly promised a theme area to be announced in the future, where users can both download free themes and buy more advanced, “premium” themes. The release date of this new feature has not yet been announced.

Also of note in the stats report was the web browsers used to view the site. Mozilla’s Firefox led the pack with 71% of visitors, followed by Apple Inc.’s Safari web browser. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only took 11% of the share, and IE 6 was only used by 2% of the site’s total visitors during the month.

Ptah Dunbar, another author and developer at WPCandy, was not available for comment.

Stats recorded with Mint. This was originally a parody post Dan wrote but Mike forced him to post it. Sorry if you don’t get the humor in this. :)

“WordPress Day” Prize Winners

Here are the winners of this year’s first unofficial WordPress Day contest. We had 20 awesome prizes to give away to participants who either left a comment or made a blog post about why they love WordPress. First, a big shout-out to all of our sponsors who made this contest possible:

Now, here are the winners:

All of the winners will soon be contacted by the sponsor of their prize. We had over 120 comments and blog posts thanking the Automattic team and talking about how you’ve used WordPress. Thanks to everyone for your participation.

-the WPCandy team

Welcome To The All New WPCandy v3!

WPCandy is back and better than ever. We’ve been working hard for a little over a month now, and we’re extremely proud to present you WPCandy v3. Ever since we launched WPCandy v1 in October 2007, we’ve been one of the top WordPress-dedicated blogs on the internet, bringing you the latest tips, tricks, and hacks. Today we’ve taken the site one huge step further.

Read more…

The New WPCandy Team

Ever since Michael Cromarty decided to leave the WPCandy team in early February this year, I’ve been mostly running this blog on my own with the help of some guest bloggers. I’ve been on the lookout for a new partner to help cover the tasks Michael used to do, as well as just help with around in general. Well after a little hunt, I ended up gathering 3 2 new partners! Read more…

Let’s Get Naked

To celebrate the third annual CSS Naked Day, WPCandy has gone naked. I have temporarily removed our stylesheet to honor Web designers and Web standards. In fact, if you personally know a Web designer, thank him/her today!

“The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your .”

What does this have to do with WordPress? Not much, actually. Except that quite a few blogs (powered by WordPress) that I read have participated in this event. I thought I’d make a post just to notify you guys that WPCandy participated in this event and we didn’t just delete our stylesheet by accident.

Let’s Discuss WordPress

A few months back I wrote a post about having a forum here at WPCandy, but the idea slowly died and it just disappeared and I never said another thing about it. At the time, the idea seemed great, but as I thought a bit more about it, I realized forums are hard to keep up with, especially if it became popular. I’m still not sure about a full forum, so let’s try something. Let’s try a Twitter-like discussion board. This discussion board will be using Automattic’s very popular Prologue WordPress theme released a few weeks back.

If you’re up for it, join us tonight at 5pm EST (GMT-5) over at our Discuss page. Right now, there’s only a countdown, but the Discuss page will be open at around 4:45pm, to allow you guys to register and all that good stuff.

What Will We Be Discussing?

Anything related to WordPress really. This discussion page will be pretty open to anything users have to say about WordPress. There will be a few guidelines of course to make sure things don’t get too out of hand.

The Guidelines

  1. No excessive profanity
  2. No direct advertising
  3. Post within the default tags
  4. Have fun

On another note, we’ve successfully upgraded to WordPress 2.5. Have you?

6 Months of WPCandy In Review

First of all, happy April Fools Day. Yes, we were going to play a joke on you guys, but we ended up not continuing with our plan, simply because we didn’t want to cause any negative feedback.

Being that it’s April 1st, that means WPCandy has officially been up for 6 months! Woah. I’m not sure about you, but 6 months has gone by extremely quick. It seems like just yesterday when Michael Cromarty and myself launched WPCandy.

Anyways, here are some stats and other stuff that’s happened around here in the last 6 months.

October 2007 - March 2008 Statistics

1,260 Total Comments
10,493 Total Spam Comments
153 Total Posts
63,049 Total Unique Visitors
183,899 Total Returning Visitors
Total Revenue - $610
Total RSS Subscribers - 1415
Alexa Ranking - 63,306
Technorati Ranking - 9,592
Google Pagerank - 5

Read more…

We’re Having Server Issues!

Hey everyone, if you’ve been to WPCandy within the last week or two, you might have noticed it has been down. We’re very very sorry. Ever since we switched from WPDesigner Hosting to MediaTemple, our site has been going down at least once each day. I thought MediaTemple was supposed to be awesome! I guess not.

Anyways, if you are experiencing any problems with accessing WPCandy, please hold tight, we’re trying to get it sorted out with MediaTemple (we send a support ticket to them each time our site is down, complaining to them). If you’re hosted with MediaTemple, have you also been having problems like us?