Personal website - how do YOU measure success?

Since I set up a website a few years ago as part of my coursework on an IT course I have monitored it's progress through visitor stats and Google page ranking. Whilst an e-commerce website I have only sold one print through it, so I'm hardly living it large on the fruits of my hobby. I've seen it's google pr rise from somewhere in the 20's to 2, where it seems fairly static for now. Page views are typically 2800 for a month. Only once have I been refused a mutual link exchange by a photographer. The question remains however, is my website a success, or rather how successful? Which, or how many, yardsticks do I measure it against?

A further thought struck me. Do we use our websites, or their activity if it is our only means of getting our work out to the public, as a measure of our skills/popularity as photographers, or the quality of our work as a whole.
Do others use a website as purely a tool to achieve something. If so, again how do you measure it's effectiveness? A saw is a tool, we can tell from use if it's blunt/out of set etc.
I suspect there may be a range of answers........

When I first set my website up, I had ideas about using to sell images - then I realised that actually it was much better (for me) as a way of showing my work to potential clients. I don't sell anything through it now and prefer to have it just as an online portfolio showing my particular style.

Initially I thought my site was a failure, but recently I've been getting enquiries because of it - in fact, I'm off next week to shoot a front page for a London magazine because the editor had been given a link to my site, liked what she saw and offered me the job. So, whilst my site does not have large numbers of people visiting it, it has been successful for me.

two options.

1. Sucess in other peoples eyes.
2. Sucess in your own eyes.

The first option is out of your control and irrelevant.
The second option is so easy. When you set it up you have objectives for the site to deliver. If it delivered the objectives then it's a sucess. If it didn't then it's a failure.

Thats all there is to it.

Of course, when you discover that your objectives for the site turned out to be completely unrealistic, you can easily delude yourself further by attributing a few minor tangential benefits as success and forget that it failed in its original objectives.

rob champagne said:

Of course, when you discover that your objectives for the site turned out to be completely unrealistic, you can easily delude yourself further by attributing a few minor tangential benefits as success and forget that it failed in its original objectives.

Click to expand...

Or you could reset your expectations...