2010 was a big year for Bicycle Design. In late February, I finally moved the blog from the old blogspot subdomain to the current location at BicycleDesign.net. The old URL had quite a few incoming links, so it took a while for traffic at the new location to ramp up. There are still thousands of old links to bicycledesign.blogspot.com out there, so throughout the year redirects from the old site accounted for just over 25% of the total traffic. Not counting that though, and excluding traffic from search engines, Facebook, and Twitter, the top referrers to BicycleDesign.net from 2/26/10 to 12/31/10 were:

1. Gizmodo
2. Urban Velo
3. London Cyclist
4. Instructables
5. EcoVelo
6. Engadget
7. Interbike Times
8. Wired
9. Bike 198- Mountain
10. Treehugger

If you compare the 2010 list to the top referring sites in 2009, you will notice that there are some notable omissions. Many of those changes are directly related to the domain change though. Fat Cyclist, for instance, sent a significant amount of traffic to Bicycle Design in ’09 and continued to do so in 2010. Until late in the year though, the link from Fat Cyclist pointed to the old blogspot URL, so even though a click on the FC blogroll was automatically forwarded to the new location, it didn’t show up as a direct incoming link in Statcounter or Google Analytics (just part of that 25% from the old domain).

As with the top referrers, I don’t have data for top viewed posts for the first two months of the year. From 2/26/10 to 12/31/10 though, the site received 778,006 pageviews from visitors in 190 different countries. The most viewed posts during that time were:

1. Fast Forward Powered Pedals
2. A 6-pound Road Bike
3. Shimano Alfine 11-speed
4. Trimtab 3×3 recumbent Trike
5. TATO Bicycles
6. Mechanical Doping and the Future of E-bikes
7. Shimano STEPS Group for E-bikes
8. Urban Arrow- An Electric Assist Bakfiets Design
9. Batavus BUB review
10. E-bikes from Lexus and VW

It is interesting that half of the top 10 posts in 2010 were related to e-bikes. With Gizmodo, Engadget, and Wired as top referrers to this site, the slant toward e-bike posts is not all that surprising, but a quick glance at the Google keyword data shows that many visitors who landed on the site were specifically searching for electric bike content. I expect that trend to continue this year as more and more e-bikes will be designed from the ground up rather than just developed as an afterthought based on existing bike models. Of course, you can expect to see much more than just e-bikes on this blog in 2011. Whatever happens in the world of bike design, look for it right here.