Milestones

2007

• March
• Unique Visitors increases by 33.83% to 21,921 and Total Visits increased by 38% to 33,796 according to AWStats.
• Now ranked 9th on SATopSites.com
• Some serious offers to buy out BlueSting have been made, but I'm not prepared to sell until BlueSting has reached it's true traffic potential, which has not happened yet!
• Not much work has been done on BlueSting this month, because the next phase of SA domination is in the pipeline, more will be revealed soon!
• February
• Unique Visitors increases by 93% according to AWStats. Every other traffic indicator increased dramatically as well!
• We started the month ranked 16 on SATopSites, we ended the month ranked 11. Getting harder to climb!
• Several new merchants sign up, and we launch our first co-branded website, comparison.onlineshopping.co.za
• Several new enhancements to the engine are made, many related to the co-branding capability.
• The 3rd Generation of our XML schema is launched, reducing file size by up to 50% and therefore our bandwidth costs, making daily updates even more cost effective!
• BlueSting moves to a new host, a bit of down time, but nothing serious, everything goes well!
• BlueSting's birthday, we become a 1 year old!
• January
• BlueSting.co.za's Google PageRank drops to 2 in the US Data Centres, but climbs to PageRank 5 in the UK
• BlueSting.co.za finally gets new "static" URL's for several pages.
• Enhanced the image resizing code.
• Massive database changes to the live bluesting.co.za in preparation for launching the new interface with the new structures.
• Projected traffic estimates for 2007, are between 40,000-75,000 unique visitors in December 2007
• Using a modified version of the PriceFind.co.za engine, many new enhancements have been made for a re-loaded bluesting.co.za website, such as:
  • Enhanced Search engine, including "Merchant enhanced" results
  • Bread-crumb navigation bar
  • Improved page navigation
  • Price History graphs ported from older engine, and improved!
  • Better category navigation
  • Various other code improvements

2006

• December
• Massive database conversion to new structures at the heart of the system is rolled out smoothly with no downtime. Structural changes affect almost every major page.
• Digital Cameras added
• November
• BlueSting.co.za becomes a pay-per-click service, due to the rising bandwidth/hosting costs
• October
• BlueSting.co.za gets a Google PageRank of 3
• September
• Price History graphs are implemented.
• Sign up several new merchants.
• August
• Hard Drives, iPods and Garmin GPS are added
• bluesting.co.za gets a new "metallic" logo
• bluesting.co.za records 1500 product clicks
• Bandwidth increases so much, we have to upgrade our hosting package twice in a week, and implement emergency changes
• PriceFind.co.za is launched. This completely new engine is very experimental and will not be as big as BlueSting.co.za
• Almost 3500 Unique Visitors now
• SATopSites.com ranking now at 18
• July
• Cell Phones are added.
• June
• Joined SA Top Sites, ranked 116 on 5th June, ranked 26 before the end of the month
• Started advertising on SATopSites.com
• Began work on PriceFind.co.za
• Several new merchants sign up.
• May
• Jump Shopping launches a competing service
• Signed up new merchants, monitored Google search index and Alexa ranking
• Almost 1500 unique visitors
• April
• Flash memory products loaded
• Signed up as an OfferForge, BlueBean, SAcamera.co.za, Simplicity Online, Take 2 and NetFlorist affiliate!
• A few hundred BlueSting pages now appear in Google, Alexa traffic ranking continues to climb
• Signed up another merchant
• March
• 500+ Unique Visitors to bluesting.co.za
• Improved code execution speed and reduced database queries
• We win a few more merchants, and loose one
• Brand directories are implemented
• Initial Processors and Monitors are loaded in the system.
• Alexa traffic ranking continues to improve throughout the month
• Currency conversion implemented
• February
• BlueSting.co.za is loaded up on a local host.
• Many new features implemented in preparation for Comparison Shopping, basic IP and Click logging implemented, structural changes to promote the merchants and make them more visible
• Recorded the first 2 clicks on the "Buy Now" button.
• First advertising deal, encrypted email addresses, many new admin screens created for merchants, many bug fixes and better cross-browser compatibility
• January
• Signed up with ParadymSolutions to host the domains (bluesting.co.za is just an alias domain)
• BlueSting.com is launched.
• Website gets slower, presumably due to increased traffic, start looking for alternative hosting.
• Applied for affiliation with several other websites, was turned down by some, never got a response from others and never bothered pursuing the rest!
• Became an Amazon, TigerDirect and BizRate affiliate
• Became a Google AdSense and AdWords client

2005

• December
• BLUESTING CC is registered
• Initial work on the database and several admin screens for an e-commerce system
• November
• 30th: bluesting.com and bluesting.co.za are registered