After a significant amount of time dumped into development, the site more or less went live one year ago. It’s certainly been an interesting path. I was beyond naive with regard to how search engines worked and more importantly how people work. I thought that simply aggregating information with a unique spin would vault the site to the top of search results.

The top sites for search terms like “beer calories” and “wine calories” just aren’t very useful. They are old, ugly interfaces and many of the other top sites are the so-called content farms, like Livestrong and about.com. In fact, Yahoo Answers represents the worst of all worlds, because there’s basically no quality control. Hint: Quora is Yahoo Answers for smart people. In any case, rising to the top of search engine rankings is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, Bing uses domain age for a large part of its algorithm, so it’s obviously much tougher for new sites to rank highly.

Generally speaking, for the site to take off, it has to be more interactive and engaging, combined with a well executed social media strategy. For that, I’m probably going to turn to someone else, because I don’t really have the time or desire to launch a real campaign. Eventually, I’d like to make a mobile app using the site’s infrastructure, but I’m not willing to launch an app into the world unless there’s significant buzz. With all that said, let’s look at some fun stats.

Visitors in the past year: 37,600
Most popular countries (% of users)

1. United States (83%)
2. UK (4%)
3. Canada (4%)
4. Australia (1%)
5. South Korea (.5%)

Nothing too surprising here. It’s an English language site, so that’s going to be the reader base. But South Korea? Not really sure how it’s #5.

Most Popular States

1. New York
2. California
3. Texas
4. Pennsylvania
5. Illinois

Again, nothing too shocking. New York is higher than Cali because that’s where I grew up and my friends there did a great job of promoting it. Aside from NY, there’s a pretty strong correlation between visits and population.

Most Viewed Pages

1. Getting to Know the Characters of Boardwalk Empire
2. Home Page
3. Beer Home Page
4. Blog Home Page
5. Inside the Mind of a Bathroom Attendant

So this one is a little screwy. A post I wrote about comparing the characters of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire to their real-life counterparts has attracted the attention of Google and steered a lot of traffic in, even generating 121 Facebook Likes. The home page is #2 because Thrillist linked to it in one of their daily emails last April. The main beer page is one of the core parts of the site, so it should be ranked highly. Livingwithballs.com was helpful promoting that end of things. The blog home is high because the people who stumbled onto the Boardwalk Empire post end up visiting the main blog section if they decide to stick around at all. And Kavorka’s rather hilarious post checks in at #5 because it got picked up by Asylum, Cool Material and DoubleViking. It also gets some great search traffic, like “my son see me pissing in the sink, now he want to piss there too.” I guess most of those words did appear in the post, but I assure you that dispensing parental advice has never been a goal of the site.

So, we’ll wrap up this post with things to look out for in the next 12 months.

1. Social Media campaign
2. A more comprehensive wine section
3. More guest blog posts
4. If things go well, an app

Happy April Fools and thanks for reading and supporting the site!