HOME (main menu)

INDEX

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What the site is ABOUT

WHAT'S NEW

Origin and development of the site
See What Was New. The site was officially launched in February 1997

Size of the site
2.07Mb, compared with 906Kb in April 2000

Number of pages
Using the site's FreeFind box, and entering 'virtual' [part of the heading on each page] it returned 123 pages (although about 20 of those relate to Imago Mundi back issues

Number of links
The free linkchecker, Xenu's Link Sleuth, reported a total of about 2,400 links, after altered URLs had been corrected and dead links removed. Using Siteowner.com for individual pages, it appears that there were 560 links on Images of early maps on the web and 508 on Web articles and commentaries on specific topics in the history of cartography. [Those two pages were then broken down, in January 2003, into 12 separate URLs, so future totals will be less easy to obtain]. Note that 'Map History' as a whole is not a links site; the majority of pages do not carry multiple external links.

Updates
When a number of updates are made across the site, this is noted on the Homepage. Monthly updates to Images of early maps on the web and Web articles and commentaries on specific topics in the history of cartography are noted at the top of the menu page concerned. To find the date at which one of the other pages was last altered, open up that page and then type into the address line: javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Searching across the site
Use the FreeFind search facility, found on several of the general pages

Links to the site
As measured by Alltheweb (FastSearch) - advanced, there were supposedly 1,947 sites pointing to the Homepage, but this did not seem to exclude internal links, as was claimed. And the figure for some other pages was lower than six months previously!

Site Visits
The free hit counter provided by Extreme Tracker recorded the following hits for the best month last year (2002), for the three most popular pages: Images of early maps on the web (ll,799); Homepage (9,752) and Web articles and commentaries on specific topics in the history of cartography (1,484). Since most of the traffic to the Web Images site comes from external sources (less than 20% is referred from the Homepage), and almost none goes from Web Images to the Homepage, the total hits to the site are not much less than the combined figures for the Homepage and Web Images, i.e. a (purely theoretical) figure of up to 20,000 per month.

Testimonials and awards
I receive a gratifying number of compliments and occasional citations on other sites. However, the most important thing is what you think! You may not believe this but constructive criticism is more valuable than praise. It is extraordinary to me how very few of the site's fault have been pointed out to me. I have had to find them myself, and have undoubtedly missed many as a result.

Comments are welcomed on the above, particularly tips from more knowledgeable webmasters