ShopInBerkeley History

• Over 100,000 hits this month! 70,000 on business pages, plus 30,000 on directories.
• b₂ blogging software turned out to be too susceptible to spam comments, so we switched to WordPress. Visit our blog here.

• Installed b₂ blogging software to expedite the posting of achievements, upgrades, etc.

• Over 50,000 business page hits, plus 30,000 hits on indexes. Ned's Books received over 3,000 hits, Hs Lordships has received an average of 1,500 hits for the last three months.
• Added restaurant reviews. Using a open source phpBB bulletin board software, visitors can now write, read, and respond to restaurant reviews.
• Moved our server to Canaca.com due to our increased traffic, to get better rates, and more functions (including the ability to add subdomains --like yourbusiness.shopinberkeley.com-- and multiple email accounts --like yourbusiness@shopinberkeley.com. We still highly recommend Norcov.com for local dial-up accounts and smaller web hosting.

• Last month 40,000 hits on business pages (1,350/day), plus 34,000 hits on indexes.
• We're experimenting with Google ads on our directory pages. Google attempts to target ads so many of them will be local businesses. If they don't generate too much income, or if too many of them are for distant businesses, we'll probably pull them.

• We upgraded our site to a PHP server (still with Norcov.com) to allow us to add similar content to each page, and change it in one place and have these changes appear on all pages.
• Introduced "Let us know if there's an error on this page" form at the bottom of each page. This has generated many corrections submitted by owners and web surfers.

• 20,000 page hits this month (over 680/day), plus 11,000 hits on indexes.
• Pomegranate Mediterranean Cuisine's menu receives over 500 hits this month.
• Roll-over photo gallery added to Hopkins & Monterey/California neighborhood index. As you move the mouse over a business name, their photo pops up in the center. (Technical points on Javascript addition: Photos of store are kept very small to help the page load fast; page will work on non-Javascript browsers, although the photos won't show.)
• After a few requests from non-Berkeley businesses for free pages, we implement a new policy: Businesses in business districts that are part in Berkeley and part in Albany, Emeryville, or Oakland may purchase "Member" listings, although Free pages will still be reserved for Berkeley businesses only.
  

• Over 14,000 page hits this month! 20,000 including hits to indexes.
• Ned's Books receives 1,762 hits, 59 per day.
  

• Installed a "pop-up" window survey on Restaurant, Movie, and Alphabetical directories (survey can be found here). The window used a "cookie" to ensure that viewers didn't get it more than once a week. The survey included two questions, and a contest for five $20 gift certificates to Berkeley businesses. It's true what they say that people ignore pop-up windows: Less than 1% responded. We did get a couple valuable comments.
• Fazing our Greenspun redirect counter (see June 2002). Too much downtime on the Greenspun server lead to folks not getting through to the outside web sites. Too bad they couldn't get their server more stable. It is a great product otherwise.
• Two restaurants with menus posted on ShopInBerkeley have their menu hits rise from 30 to 100 to 200 in three months (Pomegranate and Thai Delight).
  

• 9,654 page hits this month (over 300 per day)!
• About 25% of these page hits originate from UCB computers (10% from UCB Residence Halls).
  
• Ned's Books receives 817 hits (average = 27/day!), 645 (80%) of these visitors "clickthrough" to Ned's own web site.
  
• Theaters pages (live, companies, and movie) added.
  

• Added Atomz.com search engine capability. This allows the immediate re-indexing of the site when changes are made, thus giving up-do-date searches. Atomz.com is a great, free search engine for medium sized web sites. It also allows me to view logs of what words or phrases are being searched.
  
• Added Movie Review pages . See our reviews of movies.
  

• Added "Cascading style sheets" to remove tables and allow for quick changes to colors and background image (for seasonal variety).
• Added www.greenspun.com's redirect counters to record hits on businesses web sites that originate from ShopInBerkeley's web pages.
  

• New home page design: "Splash" graphic added to home page to simplify it and direct shoppers and business owners to their relative "corners" of the web site.
  
• 8,097 page hits  this month!
• Highest hit generator: Pacific Bicycles receives 350 hits for the month. Their average for the past four months is 6.5 hits per day!

• Themes added:
• Restaurants:
• Vegetarian: 18 listings
• Restaurants with menus on ShopInBerkeley: 2 listings and growing
• Special offer for restaurants: free posting of menus for 2002 . (No commitment for renewal in 2003 required.)
• Highest hit generator: Ned's Books receives over 10 hits per day! Total 362 hits for the month.

• Web hosting moved to Norcov Research, a locally-owned internet service provider located in El Cerrito.
• The decision to move to Norcov from LMI was made due to LMI being bought out, then the new company going bankrupt and service going way downhill. During the bankruptcy, some of the old LMI local employees were able to purchase the Berkeley assets and are now running LMI as a locally-owned ISP and web hosting company. ShopInBerkeley highly recommends both LMI and Norcov at this point in time.
• Themes added:
• Rentals: Cars & Trucks: 18 listings added.
• 4,800 page hits this month!

• Themes added:
• Used clothing listings: 14 listings added.
• Transportation listings: Public transit agencies and taxis added.

• 150 stores/services listed on ShopInBerkeley

• First month with over 2,000 page hits .

• First month with over 1,000 page hits .
• ShopInBerkeley.net, org, and ShopInB.com, net, and org registered as site names.
• Themes added:
• Apartments and housing rental services: Six listings added.
• Coops, collectives and nonprofits: 16 listings added.

• "Bikes and bookstores"theme identified. ShopInBerkeley will grow by focusing on  types of businesses with complete coverage (as well as continuing to provide listings to any business who submits information over the web).
• 46 bookstores added to listings.
• 12 bike shops added to listings.
• Online submission page added: Businesses can now fill out an online form to submit the information for their web page.
• Google customized search page added: uses Google's search engine to search ShopInBerkeley's pages.
• First online submission: Al Lasher's Electronics
• Old City Hall "Photo soon" image added as default image for web pages.

• First month with over 500 page hits .

• ShopInBerkeley.com registered as a web site name
• ShopInBerkeley web site launched, hosted at LMI.net in Berkeley.

• Lee Amosslee tries to order a pizza delivery. Lee doesn't eat cheese, Laurel is allergic to tomato. Pizza Rustica has a great variety of soy-cheese pizza (don't worry folks, they also offer cow cheese pizzas). Lee and Laurel think, "Wouldn't it be great to be able to look at the menu before calling, so we'd have a better idea of what we want and not have to have whomever answers the phone read it to us." And thus, the ShopInBerkeley concept is born.

On "hits," and web site counting:

• Web statistics are numbers that are often inflated. A "hit" on a web site is usually considered any request for a file from that site. If a page has no graphics on it, a visit to that page is one hit. If it has ten graphics, that's eleven hits (one for the page, ten for the graphics).
• Another way of counting is page hits: page his is the number of times a web page is requested. All "Page hits" counts include business pages only! Views to our alphabetical and neighborhood indexes, park highlights and other pages add about 60% more hits.
• At ShopInBerkeley, I have chosen to report the number of page hits as the important data.
• Note that even page hits are somewhat inflated. When search engines "spider" the net, checking for pages and page updates, the web serving computer records these as a page hits.