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

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’!

By clicking on the blue Facebook icon, visitors can re-post specific articles and a thumbnail (if desired) from this site directly to their Facebook wall. The green Retweet button works basically the same way via a Twitter account: the site name, the post’s title and a shortened link back to it will automatically appear in the 140-character text area ready for re-tweeting.

We were a little hesitant about all this at first (hey, deep down inside we’re old school) but have gone ahead and caved in to the latest trend. The buttons are bit quirky and require a little coding trial-and-error, meaning there’s a chance at first you may get sent to virtual purgatory, so please bear with us. We appreciate your being sociable!