Like a lot of bloggers, I use the Sitemeter service to keep tabs on how many people are visiting my site, how much time they spend here, and so on.

A couple weeks ago I decided to upgrade my Sitemeter account from free to paid status. I didn’t really care about some of the benefits of a paid account, but one benefit I cared about very much:

See, with the free (basic) plan, you can see what a site visitor’s entry page was — that is, the first page on your site that they came to during a given session; and you can see what his or her exit page was; and you can see how long his or session lasted, and how many total pages s/he viewed during that time. What you can’t see is which specific other pages (if any) s/he visited in between the entry and exit pages.

This is a little frustrating. If someone’s stopped to read ten pages on your site, wouldn’t you want to know what pages, exactly, were the eight pages between page 1 and page 10? Of course you would.

That’s the benefit I’m really paying for. And boy, it’s been instructive.

I mean, you expect a lot (er…) of people to come to the home page, sniff around a little, and then disappear. Others (like those who might be following your RSS feed), you expect, will see just the most recent post (and then disappear). What’s been really interesting to see is how many people sort of wander in the front door and then proceed to wander more or less aimlessly around the place, pulling open drawers, inspecting their contents, going upstairs and checking out the rooms there, and so on — before bailing 15 minutes or more later.

Thinking about this, I have concluded that maybe people just can’t figure out what sort of site this is. Unlike most blogs, it’s not single-purpose. I post often about books, writing, and so on, but somebody visiting just for that is likely to be put off by a post about (say) the Linux operating system. Somebody who sees this post show up in the Google hits for a search on “linux” is going to be completely confused on their arrival. And so on.

With all that in mind, I’ve added a new page to the site. It’s not a blog post per se, but it (like the About page) is linked at the top of every page in the blog, as “Navigating RAMH.”

If you need help figuring out where to start — or where to end, for that matter — that page is as good a starting point as any.

P.S. I’m also working on a style sheet which will enable you more easily to print out RAMH posts, if that’s how you prefer to read. (Killing trees is NOT a practice I recommend, though!) This style sheet will suppress the left- and right-side menus, and include other features more amenable to offline “reading” of the more verbose posts, especially. Assuming I actually write some.