Sunday, September 14, 2008

Why Sitemeter, why?

We interrupt this broadcast for a personal message:

The new Sitemeter SUCKS!!!

What were they thinking?

They took a simple, clear and easy to use design and made it look and function like a 1996 kludge nightmare.

I have a maxim:

Any attempt to improve something that already works rarely does and usually makes it worse.

or:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Can we have a Sitemeter Classic setting? Please?

Apologies to those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

update: I posted this very early in the day, so there wasn't a great deal of response yet, but now that I look again:

Google Blog Search
Twitter Search

There seems to be a consensus.

update: Hoo-ray! They're going back to the old Sitemeter! Kudos to them for responding. Do you think Microsoft would have done that?

11 comments:

The Nag said...

Oh no! Something else to mess with your pleasure meter.

Anonymous said...

There were certainly things they could have done to polish the old Site Meter, but YIKES! did they screw it up.

I'm probably going to move to Clicky, but it's nowhere as good as the old Site Meter for a quick overview.

John M. said...

ARRRRRRGH!!!

I'm going to have to find something else.

I'm giving them two weeks to do something or I'm out of there.

I agree that they could have tweaked the old one a little, but it worked fine for me.

I might just stick with Google Analytics and FeedBurner, but the nice thing about Sitemeter was that you could check individual visits in detail.

Anonymous said...

Wow, it's almost completely useless. I always loved sitemeter for its wonderful design, ease of use, and how convenient it was. They took away almost all of that in one big swoop and we're left with some sticky mess that I've yet to find out where the referral report is.

This just sucks.

Radmila said...

I can't even get into mine!

How's that for sucking?
I've got a ticket in, but I'm sure that I'm pretty far down the line

I've installed a StatCounter, and may have to stay there.
There's an individual detail page available on that counter.

Anonymous said...

I'm already moving to a new stats package. Sitemeter really sucks. It's so ugly and useless.

John M. said...

I put in a complaint in "suggestions".

Told them it sucked out loud.

What I wan to know is, who is the genius that said, "Hey, I like that, let's run with it"?

Anonymous said...

I thought they would get some more space on their server on those days they get overwhelmed and crashed. I certainly didn't expect this.

It's so confusing, it's slow, it's constant login (for more slowness) and I don't understand a single thing like why the number of visits for one section is different than that for another. They don't really explain anything.

John M. said...

Well, it looks like we get to go back to the old system.

Buck said...

Dropped in as a result of a google blog search... and I agree: debacle.

But... re: Do you think Microsoft would have done that?

Say what you will about M$, but at least they do beta-testing and such... and end-user testing, too. It's clear (to me, anyway) the SiteMeter folks did NOT.

John M. said...

You're right about that, Buck. Perhaps I was unfair, but I don't think that many companies would go back to the old version based on user outrage. Most would ride it out in hopes that people would get used to it.

The linchpin there is testing.

There's also the whole retail vs. online apps thing. It's a much bigger decision to pull physical product of the shelf as opposed to canning an online item.