For two or three years now, I’ve had another dog website but I’ve never quite figured out how to make it work.

This week, I had an AHA and now it’s finally got some content on it.

The website is www.online-dog-resources.com and my plan was to bring together a variety of places where you can get dog supplies online. But I never quite got around to it, maybe because it seemed like a daunting task to pull together.

My AHA was to use eBay as the main resource. I have a program which provides eBay data to be put on a website and continuously updates the listings, and since I’m already a fan of the “world’s largest marketplace,” it was fun to do this.

You can see sample results for a page I did on small dog carriers. There are plenty of other topics I’ve done there too, and now I’ll give the site some time to season before deciding whether to put more up.

Besides eBay, I do also have a link on every page (upper right) to the specials page at one of my favorite dog supply companies.

I can find out all kinds of interesting things about who comes to this website and what they do, in the aggregate. I recently put a little world map on the homepage of training-dogs.com, which shows where people are coming from. (This information comes from something called the IP address of your internet connection.) This has been a surprise: I expected readers from the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, but the map also shows quite a few people coming from various parts of Asia and the Middle East. We truly live in one world.

The number of people who come to the site daily has been rising steadily. The past couple of months it’s been about 550 people a day. But before I get happy that I’m influencing 16,500 people a month to train their dogs in a more positive way, I’d better look at my stats for how long people stick around. Over a third of the people are out of here in under 10 seconds! This is actually typical of how people surf the net.

But the people who stick around do sometimes read a fair amount. At the other end of the spectrum, I can see that this month 107 people stayed at the site for over half an hour. For those who made it past that first ten seconds, the next largest group (some 1400) were here for three to ten minutes.

The most popular pages are the ones on potty training and crate training dogs, the homepage of the site, the Ian Dunbar page and the one about his Sirius Puppy Training, a list of puppy supplies, and a couple on positive and clicker dog training. All of these pages have been up for several years and have had time to get known… The potty training and crate training pages often get recommended at Yahoo Answers, for instance.

When I redid the site recently, I added this blog and my weekly newsletter partly to make the site more “sticky” — that’s the word webmasters use. At present about 9% of my visitors are returning and 91% first-time. I like the idea of creating a location on the web which has a particular vibe to it, so that people who resonate will come back from time to time.
I don’t know how many people are interested in this behind the scenes stuff, but there have to be a few. That’s what I love about writing webpages… I’m pretty much guaranteed that somewhere someone will enjoy or benefit from any given page.

Recently I decided to make Training-Dogs.Com a major priority, and I just did a complete makeover of the site and its look. Now I’m adding this blog and I’ve got lots of plans for both it and the site.

I’ll be posting more of the new material here on the blog: Read the rest of this entry