+101 - Vote for the best sites on the web

Alexa is an online tool used by many to guage how their website ranks against others on the worldwide web.  To understand how important a page rank is, fistly we need to understand how it works.

Alexa has it’s own toolbar which users install into their browsers, then when people with this toolbar installed visit a site, Alexa can then pick up details of traffic for the site that that browser visits.

There are many issues with this method of data collection, but the primary problem is that not everyone in the world has, or ever will, install the Alexa toolbar.  This leaves the majority of the worldwide demographic site visits un metered.  

So who would install the Alexa toolbar?  Well, people like me, geeks.  Anyone who is involved in the Internet industry will have it installed on their browser to help them work out how the site their looking at or working on is ranked by Alexa.  

My Gran, for example, when she’s shopping online for a new cross stitch kit has no interest in what Alexa has to say about the sites she’s visiting, who Alexa are, what jumpers I actually want to wear on Christmas Day or how to make custard that’s not lumpy.

All the sites my Gran visits, and my parents for that matter, the majority of every major blue chip company in the world with network lock downs on software applications and people with no interest in web development.  Leaving a pretty small demographic.  People like me, and I’m guessing like you because you’re reading this article, and the rest of the internet development community worldwide.

This leaves only one conclusion:  The Alexa Rank of a site is a rough indication of traffic from individuals with an interest in web development, world wide.

My personal opinion is that it’s a great yard stick on most sites and a slightly better yard stick on a site like 101bestwebsites.com; a lot of the people visiting this site might well have a good interest and understanding of the web.

We have now successfully moved over to new hardware which will comfortably deal with our traffic rates.

The site is now back to normal and you can submit sites as before.

Regards

The +101 team

Due to heavy traffic we’ve had to move servers, but made the mistake of ordering a managed server from 1and1!

Unfortunately it’s heavily restricted and doesn’t run MySQL 5.  We’ve managed to adjust all the code to run on MySQL 4, but there are a couple of problems left over which we are working to resolve with the server guys.

For the time being, we are unable to accept any new submissions, please accept our apologies for this and try again tomorrow.

Thanks

+101

After several emails and comments from our users, we have developed a comments module so you can now add your comments to each site we feature!

You’ll need to be logged in to leave a comment, but once registered you can leave comments on any of our growing +101 family sites.

Keep them clean

Finally we have a hit from every state in the whole of the US, all 52 states.  

We had a hit from Ridgeland on the 7th October 2008 which had filled in the gap.

Next target is all 52 states in a calendar month  We’ll keep you updated.

In terms of other site development, we’ve nearly finished our comments for each site development.  We should have that running by the end of the week, so please check back for more information soon.

If you have any ideas to make the site work better for you please let us know as we’re keen to make it as user friendly as we can.

It didn’t take too long in the end, the site is up and running:

101 Best Android Apps

If you’re already registered with 101 Best Websites you can log in and start to submit your favourite Android applications straight away. We’ll be adding comments soon and several other new features - but we thought we’d get the site online now and add the extras in later.

Now that Google has launched the first Android phone there’s soon going to be a huge range of applications appearing. One of the great features of the Android OS is the open nature of the APIs and the encouragement by Google for users to create their own homebrew apps.

So, we thought we’d give everyone a helping hand when trying to decide which application to download and try next. Watch this space for a new 101 Best Android Apps, coming soon to a browser near you!

Looking back through the stats over the last month and following on from my blog the other week about hitting every state in the US, we’ve got one last one to go!!!  Come on Mississippi!

US Map, Mississippi.

Let’s see if we can fill in that last blank with MS

After a lull in development over the last few weeks (we’ve been a bit busy with other stuff!), we added in the essential ranking that people have been asking for.  

Now you can see the rank of the sites where ever you are.  Number one in each category/topic has pride of place at the top of the page with a nice big image and then each subsequent entry has it’s ranking displayed under the box on the left.

After just six weeks our traffic and interest in the site has soared!  We’re really pleased with the results so far and thanks to everyone for the positive feedback.  

We’ve now attained an alexa rank of 126,908 and a three month average of 187,796.  The site’s been creeping in and out of the top 100,000 for a few weeks which is really great, but as we all know, alexa ranking isn’t that exact.

Our traffic is increasing exponentially too, around 200 absolute unique visits and 1000 page views a day.

Keep submitting those sites!

Plurk is a site for everyone, and whilst similar to Twitter, it has a great many more features, including a neat timeline with all the “plurks” in it.

Take a look at ours here: http://www.plurk.com/user/101bestwebsites

We’ve created an auto uploader for all our sites when they get approved so you can keep up to date with our site submissions and blog articles; see what you think!