A recent entry over at Whitespace about site stats (which I can’t link directly to as I can find it and the site has no search) got me to thinking about which web design blogs are the most popular.
Thanks to the magic of Alexa and the Good Keywords software app, here is my list of most popular web design blogs:
(Please note that this unscientific survey is based largely on the sites that I visit and includes a couple of non-blogs which I thought were worth including. Let me know if I have missed any obvious sites).
| Position | Web Site | Alexa Ranking |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A List Apart | 12,814 |
| 2 | Zeldman | 27,013 |
| 3 | Simon Willison | 30,946 |
| 4 | Kottke | 40,553 |
| 5 | Digital Web | 43,557 |
| 6 | Eric Meyer | 43,983 |
| 7 | Dive Into Mark | 47,945 |
| 8 | Boxes and Arrows | 62,752 |
| 9 | Mezzoblue | 64,964 |
| 10 | Measure Twice | 68,415 |
| 11 | Stop Design | 77,473 |
| 12 | Textism | 107,654 |
| 13 | A Whole Lotta Nothing | 116,894 |
| 14 | What Do I Know | 116,896 |
| 15 | Simple Bits | 134,982 |
| 16 | Whitespace | 147,013 |
| 17 | Asterisk | 148,091 |
| 18 | Brainstorms and Raves | 169,507 |
| 19 | Web Graphics | 207,226 |
| 20 | Andy Budd | 349,966 |
| 21 | Hive Logic | 466,558 |
For the record, my own site comes in at a lowly 525,747.
Stupid question, but what do these numbers mean?
The numbers represent the overall ranking of your site by Alexa in terms of traffic out of all of those on the web (woo). According to Alexa:
“Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users…The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data.”
So, it’s only based on people who have the Alexa toolbar downloaded, but given that supposedly they number in their ‘millions’, it should be reasonably accurate. Plus, it’s the only way to get a common view of all sites.
Rather than focus on exact numbers, I would look at the rankings in general and the trend for your site over the months – is it up or down, for example. It’s a nice, quick way to get a sense of where you fit in the grand scheme of things.
Makes more sense now. Thanks.