Joel Hainley

I’ve been working on a new set of features revolving around tracking user’s statistics relating to their performance with the question pools. I am now tracking information about each question a logged-in user sees, whether they answer it correctly and a timestamp. At the moment this information is simply being logged to a database without any visible changes to the system. I’m going to let this data accumulate over a week or two period until I have a decent set of data to test the new features.

It’s probably obvious if you think about it, but adaptive learning is really what I’m implementing here, as well as the ability for the user to see how they perform with each section and even each question. I’ll be able to show a user a graph of their performance with each question, section over time no matter whether they are simply doing practice test after practice test, or are systematically reviewing the question pools with the review tools.

This will generate a new study tool as well, because I will be able to generate tests in real-time that give them exposure to questions they haven’t seen before, or questions that they have had problems answering. It should be another fairly useful way for people to prepare for the amateur radio tests. It will also give me a chance to play with more featurs in jpgraph and to finally dig into the generation of sparklines.

In addition I’ve been working on a couple of other features that aren’t related to the above that should get hamtesting.com a lot of exposure in a very short amount of time. I’ll be announcing these new tools/features soon and at that time I’ll try to map out for you my strategy for how this is going to work. Although sometimes it’s hard to map out a business strategy when my main primary intention is to provide these tools for free to the amateur radio community.

Well it’s only been two weeks since I wrote the original entry about hamtesting.com needing some SEO love. I’ve been pretty busy since then and while I’m not into the top page yet, I’m starting to build some traffic. If you look to the previous post you’ll see that my numbers were pitifully low.

I setup google analytics, google webmaster tools, and setup the google sitemap generator and have been tweaking the content structure of the individual pages, adding in meta tags, as well as making the content, and site structure, a little more friendly to search engines. All of this has been positively wonderful for getting some decent traffic numbers for my first couple of weeks at getting started with this.

The other thing that I’ve done is modified the home page to be an better explanation of how to utilize the site to prepare for your ham radio test. I’ve also given users the ability to simply browse the question pool without having to utilize the test preparation system or the review system to see the questions in the pool for the question they are interested in. There are some other user experience things that I want to focus on over the next couple of weeks that might significantly help with user retention. Here’s the numbers for the last two weeks ( please note : this information is from google analytics, my base numbers from the original post were from adsense, I’m not sure how closely these systems agree on any given data point . )

186 visitors
2,088 page views

So given that the totals for nov2007-jan2008 were 230 page views. I think I’ve hit my originally stated goals for traffic, so now it’s time to come up with some new goals. I’d like to work towards getting the trend to increase and figure out how to crack the first page on google’s results for some of the search terms I’ve identified as being good terms to focus on.

History  

I finished the basic functionality of hamtesting.com in July 2007. I wrote the whole thing in Ruby/Rails in a week and then spent some time trying to deploy it, dealing with a bunch of issues related to inefficient xml processing etc, making it play nicely with apache and whatnot. While sitting at a Super Happy Dev House I finally had enough with trying to deploy Rails when I already knew all of the issues with PHP, so I sat down and rewrote it in PHP.   I launched the basic testing module of the site about a week later after I made it a little bit prettier( all css based ). I then wrote the review module and released that about 2 months later.

Getting The Word Out

I made a couple of lame attempts at getting some visitors to the site. I made some posts to some of the enthusiast groups and told people that I met about it, hoping to generate some interest. However, I naively thought that it would get itself found by the internet since it was vastly superior to most of the free testing sites, and even superior to most of the pay software/sites. Unfortunately it never seemed to generate much interest, I have some guesses at number of visitors in a given month and it’s VERY VERY OBVIOUS that the word ISN’T getting out.

 Using the Brain

Highly underrated, I used my brain to think about why people weren’t using the site. Then I typed in “ham testing” and “amateur radio testing” and “arrl testing” into google and started clicking back through the pages. I never did find my website. So how are others supposed to find it?

The Plan and The Goal

They say you need a goal and a plan to get there. So I have a goal. Hamtesting.com showing up on the first page of results when some keywords I’ve identified as being the most relevant are searched on. The plan is all laid out, I’d like to get triple the traffic of my biggest month thus far by the end of April, and then I’ll set some more goals.

The Baseline

In an effort to measure progress I’m going to put up some very unscientific numbers for the last two months :

january 2008 : 102 page impressions

december 2007 : 65 page impressions

november 2007 :  63 page impressions

So with those numbers as a basis perhaps we can see how effective my efforts are at generating some users for the site. I really believe the product is top notch and can improve people’s chances at passing their tests and learning what they have problems with quickly. It’s top notch, just gotta get the users!

I’ve been busy with school and other things that I’m not going to talk about at the moment *cough* cackl *cough*, however I finally got the question pool review system built for hamtesting.com. With this release, we now offer more functionality for your dollar than any other ham test prep site on the internet.

There are a few things that need to be tweaked, but this was the last major piece that needed to be done so that people had a useful tool for preparing for their tests. I’m sure that there is going to be some tweaks, feature enhancements, that will be done, but none of the other features are going to require as much work as the review system needed.

What happened was that I wrote the practice tests without using a database, everything was done using XML. When I started working on the test review system I realized that I needed all of the data in the database, which meant that most of the classes that I had used for the practice tests weren’t really usable for the review system. In the end, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it was certainly more work than it should have been.

If you’ve been reading the updates that I post here then you know that I recently received my Amateur Extra ham radio license. You are also aware that I studied using some software that I put together to study for these tests. I decided to take the software that I wrote and make it web-based, so that others that wanted to try it out could do so.

I looked around on the net and saw a few places that had free tests, but none that simulated the actual test conditions accurately. The actual tests have the answers scrambled so that you can’t just memorize the answers, this website presents the questions in the same way.

In addition, this website will also have the question pool review tools that I wrote, this will allow the user to go through the entire question pool, and save out the questions that they have problems with from the ones that they don’t so that they can focus the study on their problem areas.

I will try to make regular updates here about the progress over at hamtesting.com, if you’re really bored at work, you could even study for your ham radio license. It won’t hurt you any to have one