18th Sep 2007
Its been two months now since I launched Scrollovers (a new way of linking!). I thought it'd be nice to go back and look at how it's performed with traffic levels and search engine indexing.
If you don't know what a Scrollover is: this link is a Scrollover!
Scrollovers hit peoples browsers back at the beginning of August when it was leaked onto Digg.com. Within days, Google had indexed hundreds of sites that were referencing the domain - now, within two months, theres 1,390,000 results for 'scrollovers' - and 49,200 for 'scrollovers.com' - which isnt bad for a one page site.
Obviously, once you've been through the Digg machine theres a huge spike in traffic - the Friday I hit digg, I received 66,000 visitors - the next day, there was a drop to just (!) 20,000 and now 2 months on, im maintaining a few hundred (>400) visitors a day. Not much, but better than nothing! At the time of writing, Ive now got 2947 diggs, which isnt too shabby.
Feedback about the concept was varied. Obviously with a site like Digg you're going to get a lot of purists that are willing to sound off about any link that isnt default blue underlined. On the flip side, there are the MySpace types, who love to have every element on their page singing, dancing and zooming around the place. Personally I side with the purists and believe in function over form (but ideally strive to achieve both!). Admittedly, Scrollovers is a gimmick, and I dont think I'd use it on any of my sites other than for demonstration purposes - but that isn't to say that they dont have their place on the net. Im still getting mail from capable web-developers asking questions and giving thanks for Scrollovers - so they're obviously being integrated somewhere!
Baring in mind its limited acceptance, and questionable usefullness, would I create Scrollovers (or something similar) again...? Of course! - Where would we be if everything was standard and mundane all the time!