02
Aug/2008

by Scootworks

www.sitemeter.com is once again - down... The popular website tracking tool is now blocking users with IE from all sites on the web who use sitemeter. As usual (per my experience over the last several years of being a paying customer), they're not answering our emails, and are otherwise unreachable. The entire Gawker network, and loads of other popular sites are also dead in the water until they get around to fixing the issue.

Sitemeter is a webmaster tool that lets us know how many people come to the site, what pages they frequent most, what keywords bring people to us, etc. It allows us the ability to build a better website, something that we've been working on constantly over the last 10 years. It's not a big brother tool to see who exactly is coming to the site, harvest email addresses, peep into people's computers, and such. It's a helpful webmaster tool when it works, but over the years it's has cost many thousands of dollars in lost sales, website downtime and problems. We've offered and ask for workarounds to have our sites ignor them when they're having problems, but get no response form the company...only a recurring monthly charge from our credit card.

As of yesterday (8/1), we decided that we'd had enough losses as a result of their big company attitude. We have 18 employees that depend on www.Scootworks.com, as well as thousands upon thousands of visitors each day that expect us to be online and functional. At Scootworks, we've been rewriting hundreds of pages of code overnight to try and get www.scootworks.com back up and running for IE users.

Sitemeter may be OK for a hobby site, but think long and hard before you allow them into your back pocket. Our account is their "Premium" paid account, so we supposedly get the "best" service.

As of this morning (8/2) Sitemeter is _still_ down (without reply to emails, again). We still have hundreds of pages on www.ScootWorks.com to rewrite (instruction pages, description pages, newsletter archives, etc), but at least the bulk of the site is back up for everyone to access. We'll be working through the weekend to rid ourselves of sitemeter.

Hey Sitemeter: Thanks once again for extra expenses and sucking another pile of time away... NOT!

Dave
www.scootworks.com

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