A short time ago (2013-07-09) I rolled out a new release of GeoPortal with vastly improved UI/UX and aesthetics.¹

There was some grumbling from the locals (read: GIS people that like their websites to look like ArcMap), but I got positive feedback from non-GIS junkies. Which is all fine and good, but for public facing websites anecdotes are no substitute for analytics.

• Last full month with the old site: 12,072 visitors
• Last 30 days with the new site: 16,088 visitors

+33% Visitors!

All of the other stats you care about - page views (virtual ones via pushstate - it’s a SPA), return visitors, etc. - are all trending up. There was no advertising push other than a tweet or two on our corporate twitter account and a post on this blog, neither one of which is exactly making it rain, and those events occurred before the last 30 days of stats. I did some checking with different time periods for the old GeoPortal and the stats are honest. And the new version has only been out ~45 days!

Simple works.

In other news, I just updated it to Bootstrap 3RC2 and switched to typeahead.js for the autocomplete (mad props to @brymcbride for some code I lifted for that). The source code is up on Github.

¹ At least I think so. I don't wear skinny jeans, carry a MacBook Air, or have a reserved seat at a local Starbucks, so take my UI advice with a grain of mocha. But I did read some shit.