Forgive me for a late update, I’ve been working crazy hours ahead of this last launch. I was desperate to get it out during the holiday week when traffic was low. So far everything looks great, but before I get into that let’s talk numbers.

In June I earned $630.34, just under $100 from March’s high. Users are down 6% overall, and down 9% from organic traffic, two numbers I’m not thrilled about. Mobile users is up 5%, while desktop is down 25% and my Alexa rank continues to inch upwards, a possible sign that summer may be keeping people away from there desktops. I’ll be keeping close tabs on the numbers this month.

Delaying the launch was outstanding issues in Time Until and Miscarriage Chart. Combined those two apps make up 66% of my traffic so they needed to work flawlessly ahead of the launch.

The primary hold up with the Miscarriage Chart had to do with my new approach to mobile. Prior to the launch I had been using PHP code to detect device type (mobile or desktop) and serve appropriate content for the screen size. The primary advantage of this approach was I could serve vastly different html per device. The drawback, however, the PHP code needed to be kept update with the ever changing device landscape. Now that tablets are becoming more common, there’s more device types and screen sizes I need to pay attention to. It was going to become unmanageable. I’m now doing the cleaner approach of using media CSS statements, but it took sometime to find a block of HTML code that could be display as desired correctly across all device sizes via CSS.

For Time Until I wanted to incorporate time selection into the datechooser modal to clean up the interface a bit. I had started this process last year and finally felt comfortable that it was bug free and wouldn’t hurt my brand. I wasn’t sure it was as intuitive as the original datepicker. This is we’re having more experience with interface design would be useful. The interface could still use a little more work – here’s where not having a UX experience is working against me – but it’s better!

The past month, and especially this past week has been crazy busy ahead of the new launch. During evening and middle of the night time feedings I’d test out my site on my phone. I’d open every app on my phone, test every possible input, including invalid ones. I’d check the site health on my new admin panel and logging bugs and issues into todoist, all from my phone. During the day I’d hammer out as many quick fixes as possible. Truth be told I’d rather have another week before the launch, as not all apps were working quite to the level I wanted, but most of the issues I was discovering existed in both my test bed, and the previous launched code already in production. I didn’t want perfect to be the enemy of good.

I was initially thinking I’d have a long night ahead of me, but I’ve been watching the admin panel and have confidence there are no major fires.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft