Yay! First post of 2019!
…and it’s about my anime site.
As I expected, there wasn’t a whole lot that went on with the website this past December, but plans are finally starting to come together.
Feature(s) Update
NSFW Toggle
If you remember back in November, I talked about a plan to add a NSFW toggle to the website for images that were a little on the skimpy side.
For lack of a better term, this feature was scrapped.
I discussed it with several people, including my fiance several times, and, while the feature appeared useful, whether or not people would actually use it was a serious question. The biggest hurdle would be getting people to even notice the toggle, which was designed to be in the footer.
Once they discovered it, would they even use it? Was it necessary?
In the end, I decided it was unnecessary. I couldn’t see the benefit of having it on the site at this time, so the feature was scrapped. However, with future plans to have an account system, this feature could make a comeback as an account preference.
Genre Form Overhaul
The genre form, I feel, has been lacking for quite a while now with how detailed it should be. It’s a bit of a toss up that I go back and forth regularly on. On one side, I want the form to be as simple as possible, but on the other, the user should be able to drill down into the details if they so choose.
A happy medium that I am attempting to implement is the ability to toggle the form between simple and advanced. This will allow users who really only care about view / language / genres to quickly work through the form. However, if someone wants to take the time to mess with a few more filters, they can choose the advanced option.
These new filters, at the moment, include: release date, tv rating, episode count, and score. The release date isn’t a new item, but it has been redesigned with the rest of the new filters and will be taking its place in the advanced column.
I have just started the development of this new update. So far, I’m still only working on the styling aspect of it and haven’t gotten into the implementation.
I have this feature currently slated for an end of January / early February release, but that may be slightly optimistic. I may have to push back the timeline a little bit on it. But, we’ll see.
Account System
This is still in the super early stages of planning. I’m trying to narrow down what all I would want the account to be able to do as well as how to handle logins. As of right now, it looks like it would be social logins only, just to keep my hands clean.
Other points of interest are api integrations with myanimelist and anilist. That is…if MAL ever gets their API back online…
Analytics
Lots of green! Except for pages per session, but still, I’m loving these numbers.
December was a really good month for the website as we continue the upward trend from the previous months. We had 18,538 unique visitors with 15,344 of those being new users. Our average session duration is also up to 04:15 vs 04:10 in the previous month, which is always good to see.
Another amazing stat is the bounce rate, which decreased (that’s good) a terrific 8.83%. The bounce rate for December was 25.81%, which means that three out of every four visitors to the site end up interacting with it in some way, which is phenomenal.
All in all, a great month!
Search Console
Though the console usually remains constant, we saw some pretty good spikes in December compared to November. Even though we had 5k less impressions, the total clicks were up by 700. I’m not sure what to make of that. It is nice to see that the CTR has improved 1.5%.
With our position remaining the same, the clicks and impressions stat only gets a little more interesting. I wonder what happened this month that would cause people to be more likely to click on the site in search results.
Interesting.
January Plans
Going back to work after the holiday, and my wedding fast approaching, things are going to start getting a little crazy around the house.
That being said, my primary goal right now is the genre form update. The end of January launch, as I said previously, may be a little too optimistic giving everything that’s going on, but I’d like to get close to that mark.
I’ll just have to chug along and see what happens!
Thanks for reading.