Below The Beltway

It was early on a Sunday and I was being perhaps a little generous when I wrote about the upgraded new version of Sitemeter that launched this weekend.

I looked at it, didn’t like it very much, shrugged my shoulders, and went outside to mow the lawn before the temperature hit 96 degrees.

Since then, I’ve noticed that more than a few people — Ann Althouse, Stephen Green, Stacey McCain, and the guys at Raising Kaine (not to mention pretty much everyone else) — has come down on the side of the “it sucks” argument.

And they’re right.

All I want in a site tracker is something that’s easy to read and something that tells me who’s visiting the site and what they’re looking at. It’s possible that the new version of Sitemeter does that, but they’ve hidden it behind so many hard to navigate menus that their service is pretty close to being useless.

With the old Sitemeter I could easily open the statistics page and know in a instant what the total visitor count was at, how many hits the blog had received in the last hour, what pages were getting the most traffic, and where my referrals were coming from.  After spending fifteen or so minutes with the new version, the only thing I know for sure is what the total visitor count is and even that they saw fit to hide at the bottom of the opening page you see when you look for your stats.

Dumb design guys, dumb design.

I’m not sure what the idea behind the upgrade was, but I’m guessing they’re trying to emulate Google Analytics. It seems like they could’ve done that without taking all the functionality out of the original version.

As I said in a comment on Steve’s blog, I’m just glad I didn’t give these guys any money.

Update: Stacy McCain demonstrates just how much the “new” Sitemeter sucks:

I noticed I was getting lots of comments on this thread, and then I was able to figure out with new SiteMeter that my traffic spiked during the 2 p.m. ET hour. But who linked me? I don’t know, because the suck-ass new SiteMeter doesn’t give me the referring links!

Or at least they don’t do it in a way that’s easy to figure out.

If I can’t tell where my visitors are coming from, why they’re coming here, or what they’re looking at, then the site counter you upgraded modified the crap out of is pretty much worthless to me.

And, you know, so much for being able to look at the site log and notice that a famous, or not-so-famous, blogger had linked to something I’d written (as I’ve done in the past).

This is the blogosphere’s New Coke.

Update # 2: It looks like the reviews have been so overwhelmingly bad that they’re already working on a rollback:

We have received and heard your feedback concerning the latest changes to the website. We will implementing a rollback to the website immediately. We will also be responding to each of your support requests as soon as possible. If you have any questions please let us know.

Question # 1 — Did you even bother to test this monstrous piece of garbage on actual users before implementing it ?

Update # 3: Stephen Green still isn’t happy and neither is Justin Gardner