Dori,
How many hits did you say this site gets?
Hi Jane. We get about 1.8 million “hits” per month–which represents about 30,000 unique visitors. As I noted in a previous post, there is no perfect measure of website traffic. Even “unique visitors” (each IP address counts only once in 24 hours) can under or overestimate the number of actual human beings who come to the site because:
–If a number of folks all come through AOL or another online “helper” service, they may all have the same IP address, so 600 people could count as just one.
– If one person has an ISP that doesn’t assign a fixed IP address, he or she could count as a new visitor several times in a day.
Since there isn’t a perfect system, we chose which stats to keep an eye on and we track them over time. (I can tell you that Mondays and Tuesdays are usually our highest traffic days, though I don’t know why).
I can also tell you that, since launch, our message boards have been viewed more than 1.2 million times. This is actually transparent–you can add up message board views yourself at any time by looking at the “Total views this forum” number at the very bottom of the threads pages for each forum.
Anyway you look at it this represents a lot of traffic and it is interesting that so many more read than post.
The threads with the most views were:
Cost of Nocturnal- 12,453
NxStage Solution One Questions- 12,379
Self-Cannulation- 12,297
I predict that sometime in the next week someone will view this forum for the One Millionth time!! Dori what will that person win?
By the way I see that the name of this forum is HD—For Patients doesn’t that name imply that the forum is just for those with Acute CKD5? If the name was HD-For Dialyzors then those of with Chronic CKD5 would feel welcome. 
Maybe it’s just because I’ve heard the term “patient” used in nephrology to mean people with kidney damage and kidney failure. Home Dialysis Central promotes home dialysis. An acute dialysis patient (meaning someone with reversible kidney failure) would be unlikely to be offered home dialysis because just as soon as they learned how to do it, they’d be off dialysis and the expense of training would never be recouped.
Although people have been using the term “dialyzor” on these boards, I don’t think that many people off these boards is using that term. Just for kicks, I did a Google search for “dialyzor.” There were 294 references to dialyzor, however only one page of links showed up. Several were to our message boards, 1 to Global Dialysis, and others were for sites that talked about the artificial kidney which they had spelled as dialyzor.
I believe when the message board was invisioned, “HD for Patients” was intended for anyone with any stage of kidney disease (or a familiy member or friend) who wants to learn more about home hemodialysis. I think it’s great if we’re reaching people with kidney damage who needing to look at options for treatment. I’d love to see more people starting dialysis by going into home training.
What do you think about calling the message board Home HD-For Patients to let people know that the message boards focus on home hemo.