Blog hits go the way of the market, Polls

I have Google Analytics on this site, just to satisfy my curiosity and to assure myself that more than the few folks that post comments are bothering to view the site. The hits have tanked in the last 5 days, literally dropped to almost half, and stayed down. Don't know why; it could be the economy has put a damper on viewer's castle dreams or maybe Google has simply adjusted how hits are counted. Hope it's just the latter.

On another note, I was looking at the poll results so far. The results so far seem to indicate that would-be builders are interested in 5,000 sq. ft. plus castles that cost over $300K, would be built with a contractor's services and are made of natural materials. I get the first three just fine; but there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the first three and the final most selected item, the natural materials. To build an expansive, large building from natural stone using a contractor's services will cost more than $300K, a LOT more. Perhaps respondents are not replying to all 3 polls and the ratio is off. At any rate, there are a lot of big, expensive, stone castles wanting to be built out there.

A little off topic...

I signed up for Google Analytics just to see where visitors to this site are from (if any). I was halfway surprised to see that there was actually traffic above and beyond the very few people that I'd mentioned the site to (other castlebuilding websites). It's fun to know that people are actually looking, though their thoughts about what they've seen are unknown due to the lack of comments posted.

As one would expect, the majority of the visitors are from North America as well as a few from South America. There are quite a few visitors from Europe, though I'm sure they get a chuckle out of us Yanks building "castles" for homes. A visit to a castle-related BBS at one point showed me that some folks definitions of a "castle" are fairly rigid.

Well, it's nice to see that this site isn't completely laid out in the wastelands of the blogosphere, though I'm sure it qualifies as the odd shop at the edge of town that few have reason to visit. Hope everyone enjoys their visit.