Sitemeter migrated to a new platform this weekend in an effort to compete with other popular site traffic statistics tracking services. I eagerly went through the long migration procedure and I was disappointed with what I saw.
I have been using the free Sitemeter service for several years and it provides me an excellent idea of my latest site statistics. Though Sitemeter has been having its episodes of data loss and causing IE crashes, yet it continued to be a great service. The fact that they decided to get all premium accounts at $6.95 per year (for all traffic) was very encouraging.
So I participated in the long process to change my codename to the new email username, a new password (need to be reset by password recovery), hoping to see some great stuff. But the stats were organized in a resource intensive screen which kept loading to give away some limited statistics and I couldn’t find half the links and reports I was so used to. I believe that was the experience that many other Sitemeter fans also went through over the weekend.
Then thankfully I logged in today to see the ‘Classic’ Sitemeter back and my old username and password worked and I could check out all the stats as before. I checked their blog, and an apology was posted.
Based on some performance issues we were experiencing along with feedback from the community it appears we have pushed our new site live prematurely. Our intention is and has always been to offer you, our customers better tools and more accurate data. Obviously we fell short of this. The first thing we need to do, moving forward, is to roll out new product releases in parallel to our current platform. This will give everyone a chance to try out, evaluate, and comment on our new concepts. We would also like to take this opportunity to ask those of you who had issues or concerns with the new site to participate in future beta testing.
I really like Sitemter, and I really would like to see it improve. But when you have a popular tool or service with millions of users, it is imperative to undergo beta testing with your user community to help you make your tool better for free… no shortcuts there. The competition is too tough, and it is easy to push your loyal users to another competing service.