We spent a couple of months "in development" (with me doing most of the internal coding ... I don't even want to think how many hundreds of hours I've spent churning HTML and creating graphics for that!) ... and "threw the doors open" the first week of June.
Again, building an ad-based revenue stream was one of the key reasons that we slogged into this, and one has to have traffic figures to get the attention of "real" advertisers. One of the handiest (free) measurement/tracking tools out there is Alexa, and you're not "Alexa ranked" until you get to be one of the "top 100,000" sites on the web by their numbers. Well, look at what we just hit ...
... yep, WSI is now the 99,851st most trafficked site (from a 3-month average, as you can see we're currently quite a bit higher currently) on the Internet!
I'd attended the ad:tech show on Tuesday, and at the evening event I'd mentioned to a number of folks that it looked like we were going to be cracking the Alexa 100k this week, after 3 months, and folks were always asking me what we'd been doing to market this ... which I found odd, since, aside from some random "guerrilla" stuff that's been going on at the member-level, we've done nothing but internal mailings ... all our growth has come from building content (and there is a huge amount of content there at this point, and growing).
Also, three weeks ago I put up one of the FlagCounter widgets on the front page, and in just 21 days the site's had visitors from 119 countries, slowly creeping up towards the half-way mark (FlagCounter lists 248 countries world-wide) ... putting the proof in the "International" part of WSI!
Needless to say, I wish I was working on this and getting paid for it (I am "consulting" on this and have a back-end deal in place, so will eventually see something from the effort if things reach the levels we're hoping for), but there certainly is a sense of satisfaction that this site went from lower than 550,000 to "being ranked" in just 3 months! I also wish there were convenient ways of getting this sort of stuff (like our Club Mannequin project in SL that went from zip to being the highest ranked nightspot in about 3 months as well under our management) on the resume.
It boggles my mind how hard a time I've had in getting a JOB, when I know that I can produce results!