Blogging About Blogging: SiteMeter’s Redesign Is Awful

What follows isn’t related to politics, and probably won’t be interesting to anyone except those of you who are also bloggers.
Like a lot of bloggers I’ve been using SiteMeter to track visits almost since the beginning of Say Anything five years ago. I don’t think it’s ever been the most accurate measure of internet traffic, but it’s always been a handy, easily-checked and constant measure of traffic (and where that traffic is coming from). But recently SiteMeter announced that they were implementing an upgrade of their service, and I started to get worried.
First, SiteMeter noted in a posting on their blog that with their new service visit counts might be lower unless you spring for the premium version which costs $6.95/month. I didn’t like hearing that (you’d think they’d want their metrics to be constant no matter what) but I figured that after years of using their free service I should probably pony up anyway. And the cost wouldn’t be much. I put it out of mind until the date of the upgrade.
Well the upgrade went off last night, and I can tell you that I’m not impressed. What was once a quick and handy source for immediate information on daily traffic levels and where it was coming from is now a balky, confusing and difficult-to-use. Information such as traffic sources, average daily traffic and daily traffic by the hour which were available instantly under the old design are now difficult to find and use, if they’re available at all.
I hate to complain about a free service that has worked so well for so long, but SiteMeter is a metric used by a lot of websites on the internet (some 961,000, of which Say Anything ranks in the top 1% in terms of traffic according to the “Scoreboard” which is the only part of the new system I like) and it’s sad to see them ruin a good thing like this.
I’ll probably keep the measure only because it’s the only one I’ve used consistently since the beginning of the blog, but as far as I’m concerned SiteMeter should go back to what they had. It was easier to use and easier to understand.
Why fix what wasn’t broken?
Update: Ace feels the same way, and is giving SiteMeter the boot altogether.
I’m not willing to do that just yet as I don’t want to lose my record of visits, but I’m tempted.
Update: Looks like SiteMeter is going back to the old way of doing things. Their customers spoke, and they listened.
Good on them.