Where did this year’s 51,316 visitors come from? It’s no surprise that the majority were from the U.S. followed by Canada and then the U.K. D’uh oh.

The world according to Felderfans

And where do web surfers land when they find us? Aside from the splash page, coming in waaaay ahead of all the others was Guitar Q&A with Don. Rounding out the top five are the Band page, the excerpt from Don’s book and the category “video clips.”

Even more fascinating are the search engine key terms, in other words what folks type in the search box when searching for info about Don. Now who’d have thought “Don Felder” would be #1?

Key search words over the last three days

Last but not least, we were interested in what piece of media visitors probably click on the most. Based on the transferred kilobytes (hey, we know this is not scientific, but what the heck) we discovered that Don’s guitar solo on Sad Cafe and Joe B’s golf video from 2007 (!) got the most hits.

We could drill down ad nauseum and look for stuff like page load milliseconds and how much our CPU gets roasted, but naah…who cares. On the other hand, what we do care about is that close to 25% of our site visitors come back again. For that we thank you and send you off with best wishes for a fabulous New Year!

Quite honestly, we never expected the site to grow as it has. What started out as an HTML trial-and-error sandbox has evolved into full-blown social media geekdom. Thanks to Don and to those who have kindly donated images and other content over the years. Without your support, we’re not sure if we’d still be here today.

A word about our site commenting: After years of battling comment spam, last year we discontinued the fan forum and implemented Facebook’s social commenting system. Earlier this month, Facebook’s developers updated the format, which now allows replies and threaded commenting. Comments are now synched across Facebook and Felderfans in both directions, meaning content shows up in both places regardless of where it was posted (provided the commenter has a Facebook account and has checked the “post to Facebook” box.) As usual, visitors may still comment “anonymously” without a Facebook account, and now Yahoo users can also comment via Yahoo. The new system is still a bit buggy, but in the long run it should make for more interesting discussion and give this site more exposure across the web. We encourage you to try it out.

Photo credit

For those of you who still need a traditional “auld lang syne,” we’ve culled from this year’s posts our Top Ten of 2010.

Best wishes for a safe and peaceful holiday season and a fun, fabulous New Year!

This and more as Don answers the latest fan questions in our Guitar Q & A.

The beginning of 2010 marks our five year anniversary on the web. Since its inception, we’ve been amazed at how the site has taken on a life of its own and, quite frankly, due to the sheer number of music and fan sites on the internet, we never really expected to still be here today.

The number of site visits has steadily increased since 2005 and this past year saw close to 80,000. What’s more, over 45% of you are return visitors. We’ve got a couple of New Year’s site resolutions we want to fulfill in 2010, so stick around. As always, we appreciate your input, comments and questions. All you have to do is just drop us a mail.

Last but not least, thanks Don, for your support. Whatever you do, don’t stop rockin’!

What book about the life of rock ‘n roller Joe Vitale was published earlier this year?

a.

b.

c.

What country hosted the most “Evenings at the Hotel California” in 2009?

a.

b.

c.

What guitar did Don recently begin playing?

a.

b.

c.

Who played in both the Bob Hope and Alfred Dunhill Celebrity Pro-Ams?

a.

b.

c.

Which concert double billing made its debut in 2009?

a.
b.
c.

Well, how’d you do? If you chose “a” for every question, then dayum, you scored a perfect 100% on the final exam! If you chose “b” or “c” for any question, you should consider subscribing to our RSS feed.

After parking it for four months on another CMS, we went back into the sandbox and dug up our old favorite blogging software in the newest version, deleted monstrous media files and irrelevant posts, enlarged the fonts and images and outsourced our comment system.

We’ve yet to finish archiving everything (right now we imported only the last thirty blog entries and haven’t touched the comments yet) and you may run into some broken links here and there. But you know, so what?