Top Visio Guy Posts

The Visio Guy website has been around since September 2006. That’s coming up on three years now! I can hardly believe it.

First, I’d like to thank everybody who has visited this site and made it such a fun occupation for me! I’d also like to thank my wife for putting up with my typing and ignoring her in the evenings.

Then I thought it would be fun to share with you which posts have been your favorites.

So I dug into Google Analytics, which has been watching this site since about September 2007. Evidently it took me a year to figure out how to hook it up.

The stats in Google Analytics easily showed me which posts have been viewed the most. Not surprisingly, many older posts are among the most-viewed. Eight are from 2006, seven are from 2007, five are from 2008 and none are from 2009.

The number in parentheses is the actual number of page views, as reported by Google Analytics. About one year’s data is missing from these numbers, and there are debates as to what constitutes a page-view, but the relative counts are what is interesting.

Top 20 Most Viewed Visio Guy Articles

1. Free Visio People Shapes (19641)
2. Legend Shapes (18456)
3. Virtualization Visualization with Visio (15452)
4. Circular Multi-arrows (12628)
5. Audio Visual Components Shapes (12456)
6. Create Visio Flowcharts Programmatically (10501)
7. SharePoint Planning Visio Diagrams (9564)
8. Oblique Connectors For Your 3D Diagrams (9158)
9. Map of World (8915)
10. Rack Unit Dimension Line (8753)
11. Forefront Icons and Data Graphic Shapes (8056)
12. Go 3D with Free Isometric Piping Shapes for Visio (7918)
13. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Stencil (7825)
14. Apple iPhone Network Shape (6738)
15. The Hidden World of Visio Shapes (6419)
16. Map of Europe (6234)
17. Cisco IP Telephone Shapes (6173)
18. Sankey Diagram Shapes for Visio (5868)
19. Circular Multi-arrows in PowerPoint (5825)
20. Circular Text Generator (version 1) (5522)

A lot of sites are happy to report their most-viewed posts. But I don’t like how most-views favors older posts.

I wanted to see which posts were “loved the most intensely”, so I exported my Analytics data (in CSV format) to Microsoft Excel, worked out when the posts were written, then divided their life-spans into the number of views each one had tallied.

The danger here is that the brand-spankin’ new posts will also show skewed data. New posts generally get a lot of views in the first week. Then they are forgotten as folks read the latest-and-greatest.

But it turned out that the top-twenty most-intensely viewed posts had a nice mix. There are posts from 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 in the list.

Note: you’ll see a number in parentheses after each title in the list. This number is the factor by which the article was viewed relative to the least-intensely viewed article.

So the top article (#1) was viewed about 164 times as frequently as the least-viewed post (recent-publish-date data-skewing here, perhaps?)

#17 was viewed around 22 times as much as the least-viewed article.

Top 20 Most Intensely Viewed Visio Guy Articles

1. Need Network Shapes? Fill Your Cup at the Visio Café! (163.6)
2. Virtualization Visualization with Visio (62.6)
3. Free Visio People Shapes (41.6)
4. Go 3D with Free Isometric Piping Shapes for Visio (34.5)
5. Top Twelve Text Tips (34.4)
6. User Experience Shapes From UserFocus (33.5)
7. Rate Your Network Diagram (32.2)
8. Legend Shapes (31.7)
9. Rack Server Virtualization Add-in (30.1)
10. Crayon Network Shapes (25.8)
11. Visio Multi-shapes (24.5)
12. Oblique Connectors For Your 3D Diagrams (24.4)
13. Apple iPhone Network Shape (23.5)
14. Path Analysis in Visio (22.4)
15. Audio Visual Components Shapes (22.0)
16. A SmartShape is Worth 1000 Symbols (21.8)
17. Cisco IP Telephone Shapes (21.8)
18. Create Clean & Tidy Visio Shapes Using Images With Transparent Backgrounds (21.7)
19. Circular Multi-arrows (20.8)
20. More Free Visio People Shapes (19.5)

Again, thanks to everyone for making this website a success!

– Chris