South Baltimore’s original website is coming back stronger than ever. Here is why and how.
When a webmaster retires and moves on to other endeavors (travel, beach, photography, etc.) sometimes there is a void felt in leaving something behind. SouthBaltimore.com was created in May, 1999 as an information source for the South Baltimore Peninsula (South Bmore, SoBo) and neighboring communities – but languished with inattention for the last three years. That void recently became overwhelming and it was decided that SouthBaltimore.com, the webmaster’s first commercial website should be reborn in a modern style. The original site was never mobile-friendly but this new version is – and it is showing in the attention being paid by the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo).
The numbers in the chart below tell the story of the positive impact a bit of “attention” can provide. January, 2022 is representative of each month in 2021 – not much traffic. The new rebuilding effort began in the middle of February, with the first real transition starting on February 14th. The chart below shows growth through March. Page views went from 19,000+ in January to 75,000+ in March – after just six and a half weeks of effort and TLC. Imagine where it will be in another few months…
Page views are a valid indicator of the use a website is seeing. Unique visitors and a (larger number of visits) means that people are returning to view more of the website. They must like the changes being made. On average, each visitor looking at more than 9 pages, indicating there there must be something interesting for the reader to see.
So, what does the webmaster get out of all of this? Simply, the site provides revenue, wages so to speak, to help support the webmaster and crew. SouthBaltimore.com does not solicit paid advertising** from local businesses. Instead, revenue is derived from national advertising (such as that provided by Google and DoubleClick), affiliate product offerings (Fanatics.com sports apparel), the sale of local art photographs (Pixels.com) and commissions from hotel reservations (Booking.com).
** If a local business would like to have a presence on SouthBaltimore.com, that can be arranged. Currently, without cost.