Lord Likely is the first site in an ongoing series where I'll be looking back and reviewing the site's performance over the past year. I'll be looking at improvements in the site's statistics and traffic, and also how I've worked with the client to maintain a steady increase of visitors.

Years ago, before I even knew who Lord Likely was I had the thrilling job as a dish-washer at a local cinema; here I met a talented cartoonist and writer called Andy Fanton, who among having a small repertoire of cartoon characters he also wrote a blog called Lord Likely; which can only be described as "humorous and erotic adventures" set in the Victorian era. Sounds a bit inappropriate and offensive (for my family-friendly blog); well I won't go into details about the site's content, instead I'll focus on the facts and figures from behind the scenes. If you really are curious about the content, feel free to visit Lord Likely yourself.

Originally Lord Likely was a side-project for Andy. Another character called the Carrotty Kid, a crime fighting carrot, was on the road to being produced as a children's cartoon. A pilot had been completed by Cosgrove Hall, the folks who made Danger Mouse, and some material was prepared for a selection of TV networks.

Sadly, although the pilot generated interest from a few networks, the series never managed to find a home, and so Andy shifted his focus to his writing, and Lord Likely. Luckily Lord Likely had received some interest from a book publisher and this interest is what sparked an overhaul of the original website, which was hosted on a free Blogger page, the limitations of which necessitated a major redesign.

The new website launched on February the 9th, the average daily visitors for the previous months was around 60 a day, on the launch day the site received a massive 548 visitors (massive in comparison to previous traffic), and over that month a total of 7,581 people visited, averaging out at around 250 people per day.

This was great, exactly what Andy wanted, a boost in readers, RSS subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. From here we stayed in touch and figured out a plan for some more enhancements for the future, Andy released a podcast on iTunes, and organised a book giveaway in association with respected publisher the Friday Project; also through May and June I updated the site's design on a number of occasions.

To our amazement the blog started to appear on a few web and graphic design inspiration sites, usually I'm in two minds about those type of websites, they can sometimes be a lot of content and very little value, but nevertheless here are just the top ten referring sites that have featured Lord Likely: Inspired Magazine, Abduzeedo, CSS Mania, Web Creme, Smashing Magazine, CSS Beauty, Best Web Gallery, Vandelay Design, Hongkiat and Pattern Tap. Andy was stoked by the sheer volume of traffic this recognition from the web design community had brought to the site.

Now through June to July the site received just over 20,000 visitors, which is up 645% compared to 2008's 2,693 for the same month and the traffic has been steady up to today.

This really goes to show how a good design, some planning and a vision can really go a long way in vastly improving your website's footfall. If you would like see a similar improvement in the number of visitors hitting your website, feel free to drop me line and see how Adam Wintle Design could help you...