Around three or four homepage designs back, we used to keep better tabs of what the most popular database pages were by slapping them right on the homepage. After hard science showed that no one was actually clicking on any of that stuff, we cut it.
(Though before we go much further, I agree with you that we should probably bring it back in some form, just not necessarily on the homepage.)
As I was sifting through the growing Quick Look Thread over on NeoGAF, a dude named Karram reminded me that we used to have all that stuff. While I'm not enough of a database query man to actually build a page that automatically does this, it did get me thinking about alternate ways to get that information together.
So I started digging through the traffic logs and pulled together this list of the ten most-visited character pages on Giant Bomb for the month of January.
- Miranda Lawson
- Bayonetta
- John "Soap" MacTavish
- Tali'Zorah nar Rayya
- Subject Zero
- Taokaka
- Captain Price
- Mad Moxxi
- Death (Darksiders)
- Jill Valentine
I guess I'm not surprised that Miranda's done so well for herself, though I did think that the boss man, Commander Shepard, would make the list.
So I'll put it to you guys--I know this list stuff is pretty fluffy, but I'm genuinely interested in knowing what you guys are looking at, and I'm willing to bet that some portion of you are, as well. So what do you think? Should I keep digging and do something similar for concept pages and some of the other types of entries in our database? Or should I drop it and keep this stuff to myself, only stopping to look at it in the dead of night, when I'm at my loneliest?