Ottawa Events Progress
The site I've spent the most time working on this year is the Ottawa Events site. Not so much in the coding of the site, but in the maintenance of the data that's there - finding and entering data myself, and editing what other people post to keep it in line with the rest of the site.
At the start of the year, the site was doing about 3600 visits and 9300 page views per month. Not bad, considering I've never advertised or promoted the site. But through the year the numbers have steadily increased, to almost double that in November.
Most traffic is organic. People search for things like "ottawa summer festival", or "ottawa new years eve", and find specific events that have been posted, which is exactly how it's supposed to work. Some people check the site regularly to see what's going on this weekend, for example, and the RSS feed is great for that, but most of the time, it's people looking for something specific.
The reason I started the site in the first place is to have all the events by all of the various promoters listed in one place. Too often an event sponsored by a particular radio station isn't announced on other competing stations, or in competing newspapers. It sucks to find out that a band you love is in town, but you didn't hear about it because you listen to the wrong radio station. So far I think it's working out very well.
One unexpected occurrence is a particular company, Meet Market Adventures, has been posting their events, and they have a lot of them. These are only relevant to a particular segment of the population - singles - so I'm looking into a category system with an easy way to filter out categories that you aren't interested in.
It's cool to see Ottawa Start's Events page using the RSS feed to show a list of upcoming events right on their site.