The Soft-Launch: Website Analytics for Writers


I created and launched a website this past month. I had to. Everyone I knew was telling me, you have to have website. Even a static page. A landing page. Something. 

(Read more about that necessity here.)

So I held out for as long as I could--years and years...lots of years--and then, one day, I just created a website. 

It was no big deal, but also kind of awful. 

But that's another story. 

The website is made, for now--let's call it a "soft launch." 

And after the soft launch, you get analytics. 

Yikes.

But also kind of interesting, this data. 

I'm using Squarespace, because it's what I chose (?), and it works for now, and I already paid for a year.  So Squarespace it is. 

Ugh, do I have to?

But the analytics. 

All over the place. Who are these people, I want to say. Is it possible that I know someone in Dublin? Who could I know in Dublin, Ireland? (Why didn't I go to Trinity College junior year? How could I have turned that down, my god, what was wrong with you, younger self?) Chicago--I've been to Chicago, right, but who lives there now that I know? Half my high school is in L.A., but who is this one person who clicked their way through my soft-launch pages on June 15? And why no traffic from Pennsylvania, the Keystone State, land of my family and friends? (Philly! What's up with that?)


Like the previous post's wasps, it's kind of a horror. Sort of an unnatural horror, for an introvert, to have to make and curate a website. And then to deal with the analytics. Sorting through, poring over, squinting at them--whatever your verb choice--and then learning about the other horror of something called a bounce rate. Lots of bouncing on my site, and that's not good, I've discovered. How do I make the bouncing stop? 

A website, a soft launch--it opens a space of cringe. 

To deal with the cringe, I think it takes more cringe. To cringe through it. To fight the cringe with a cringe, and then go back, play around, maybe fix the glaring typo, and see if that, perhaps illogically, helps with the bounce rate. (Not yet!) 

Do you know the Oscar Wilde quote about punctuation? 

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma 
and the rest of the day taking it out.
That's sort of where I'm at with this Squarespace site. Tinkering with commas. 



Creating "breathing room." 



White space.



[And then just moving on to do the actual work.]

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