We're slacking behind :(

Question

_{(this is not shameless self promotion)}

I've done up some graphs to show how the Stack Apps sites are all ranking against eachother. You can check them out here.

The face of the matter is that Pro Webmasters is one of the oldest sites and we've really levelled out in our volume of questions over the past two weeks.

So this is a bit of a gee-up to encourage others to really try and get the site moving again. I want to see a huge upward swing in the question volume over the next week!

Update: I aplogise, I think I just got a bit freaked out when I first saw the status. I think I overreacted, and after reading through everyone's responses below you've all raised very good points. Thanks everyone.

Answer 1

Lets talk about it Farseeker. I want to see more questions too but I don't how to encourage more questions. We are definitely answering a high number of the questions, our current answer rate is at 98% which is pretty high. It is 6% higher than Web Apps just by comparison.

On a personal level, I have been racking my brain for questions involving SEO and Webmaster questions just so I can get people involved. I feel like we have a good number of people that know answers and solutions but we seem to be missing people who have good questions. Not that people can't know answers to many questions and still have questions to ask. I simply mean if you look at SO the top users with top rep don't ask many questions they just answer tons.

So the question goes back to, how do we get more people to ask good questions here and get more people involved. I think it all goes back to growing our user base.

Answer 2

There was a lot of good question and good answer so far. We might not be winning in quantity, but in quality we are in a good standing. As a junior webmaster, I consider this site to be a great ressource. If people consider this site to be a good place to find answer about Webmastery, then people will use it and it will stay alive and grow.

The "problem" we have now is that we have a lot of expert, but not a big user base of junior webmaster who have a lot of questions. In short term, I don't think it hurts the site. In the long term, the only problem I could see is that the expert won't stay if there isn't a lot of question asked here, but that's only in the long term.

Answer 3

No surprises here. Not slacking behind at all. This site is in the middle group of that graph. What does that prove? There are fewer webmasters than there are people who play games or people who use facebook and Google or people who cook? We already knew that so we expected this kind of graph.

Answer 4

I agree with @Kinopiko that we should not be critically comparing ourselves to other SE sites.

Think about this:

• Lots of people play games
• Lots of SO programmers jumped onto web apps, because many of them write web apps.
• Everyone eats, so surely a lot of people cook

What we see right now is basically the percentage of people that are familiar with Stack Exchange who also have something to do with running web site.

I believe, in the very near future some custom promotional materials will be made available for us to use. When that happens, I think we're going to shine quite brightly because most of us maintain several web sites. Some of us even run several ad networks.

We've got a good community here. As others have noted we also do a very good job of answering most questions. What we need is traffic, which I think ... given that this IS Pro Webmasters .. we should be able to solve (at least I'd hope so!) :)

Answer 5

Here's a comparison between Pro Webmasters and the soon-to-be-defunct Gadgets site:

Webmasters / Gadgets
721 / 630 questions
2,210 / 1,159 answers
96% / 80% answered
1,955 / 1,141 users
866 / 574 views/day

I think this shows we're in good stead: roughly twice as many answers, users and views and a great answer rate.

Our largest problem is the number of questions. The site has been pretty quiet for the past few weeks with only one or two new questions each day. Don't know what we can do to change that, however.

Answer 6

If think the term "webmaster" is to generally today. The community is surely one of the greatest, but most people identifies themselves more with the tools (programming languages, editors, frameworks, ...), software (e.g. the wordpress users ;-)) and social environment (like the CCC or other "clubs") they use.

Answer 7

As others have hinted, it is unfair to compare Pro Webmasters with other Stackexchange websites.

In fact it is totally wrong to compare any of the Stackexchange sites with each other.

Why?

Because each site is placed in different market segments and have different target audiences.

If at all a comparison has to be made then Pro Webmasters should be compared to other "webmaster" sites.

Ideally we set (revisable) targets before a venture even begins and we periodically verify if we are doing what we set out to do.