May vs April

The outcome of May compared to April is pretty much as expected. Overall traffic is down as things settle down, and dive operators finish their edits.

The very good news is that overall the share of first time visitors is up. First time visitors as a share of total visitors was very high in April as the dive operators logged on for the first time. That it managed to grow in May is very good indeed.

Minor bugfixes and updates

I fixed some minor bugs today. And a really bad one.

First off, the bad one - the "zoom level" (i.e. how close the Google Map is zoomed in) didn't get saved when new dive operators were added. Oops. Should be fixed now. My apologies.

The minor ones are more layout-related. Such as making sure that any "-quote marks are properly encoded when displaying them.

A minor layout change is that from now the last 10 or so dive operators to be added or updated will be listed on the front page.

Brief update

It's slightly less than a month since the "feature-complete" version was released. Some statistics on what's happened since then:

• 65 dive shops have updated their information
  
• Pages per visit is up by 36%
• Average time on site is up by 107%
• Bounce rate down by 26%
• New visits up by 75%

So, good progress being made. The coming month will be focused on increasing the 15% to a higher number and to start getting ratings and reviews for the existing operators.

Adding diveshops

It's now possible for registered users to add new dive shops to the database.

Up and running again

Server problems seem to have been fixed. so we're up and running again.

Hosting problems

I'm having some problems with the hosting of mydiveonline.com, it's been intermittently unavailable for a couple of hours now. You either get an error page saying that the site does not exist/is not configured, or a page saying "Service Unavailable."

New additions

The problems with emailing have been resolved, I've continued inviting dive centers to come update their information. So far I've invited some 430 odd dive centers.

Fortunately, it seems as if the initial 20% rate of invalid email addresses from my first trial was not indicative of the overall set of addresses that I have. So far only 16 of the emails have bounced.

It's great to see how they are now starting to update their information online, as you can see by the news feed on the site itself.

I've also added the latest 5 edits in the side bar on the right.

It needs to be corrected so that multiple edits within a short time period doesn't result in multiple "update" entries, but on the whole I'm very pleased with it.