Hit Me With Your Best Shot

I just popped online to view our November 2007 webpage statistics. Before you yawn and decide that I am waaaaaaay too nerdy, let me promise that I won’t get too technical. To begin, I will say in my defense that I do not view the stats every month. However, having a webpage is like sending out invitations to a dinner party: I want to know who’s showing up and what they liked. We have had an Adjunct Advocate magazine webpage since 1995 when a guy named John Cady, then a librarian at the University of Michigan Art & Architecture Library, volunteered to design one for me. It was fantastic and terrifying all at once. John came up with a terrific design, and from that one we were off and running and haven’t stopped to look back.

In November 2007, AdjunctNation had 1.68 million hits. We had visitors from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. There are part-timers everywhere, and I am pleased to welcome them all! I am always amazed when I read through the list of countries from which people have visited AdjunctNation. Our webpage is linked to many hundreds and hundreds of webpages around the world. When I view the online stats, I click through to several of the linked pages just to see how AdjunctNation.com came up in conversation. Today, I found the sleek Denver Adjuncts page. Check it out! AdjunctNation.com is listed as an Adjunct Resource.

John Cady is an Information Architecture maven at the University of Michigan now. He helps make the university’s webpage easier to navigate. Several years ago, I hired a young man named Ryan Sexton, a programmer whose favorite phrase seems always to be “We can do that!” He and I worked on the recent redesign of Adjunctation.com, as well as the design of the Part-Time Press website (where we sell professional development books for part-time faculty). Thanks to Ryan, I have a much better understanding of the nuts and bolts of web programming, interactivity and design. Along the way, I realized that I really like webpage design and architecture. Ryan moved to Utah this Fall, and now we meet weekly on iChat.

I was reading recently a complaint from an editor at a magazine who said that he wished he could simply spend all of his time copyediting. However, unlike editing jobs of a dozen years ago, copyediting is now an aspect of any editor’s job. Tending various aspects of a webpage, managing electronic content, for example, has become an important part of most editors’ jobs nowadays. Fortunately for me, I suppose, I really enjoy overseeing AdjunctNation.com. The growth in hits, visitors, page views, downloaded materials, etc….has been a direct result of my work with Ryan.

So, tell me what you love and what you hate about AdjunctNation.com. Tell me what you visit first when you stop by, and what we could do differently to make this resource more useful to you! 

Listen to my blog entry here.

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