What works and doesn't on the web

Meredith Artley, the new top editor at LATimes.com, sent a missive to the staff talking up new features on the website and ranking the most viewed stories of the past month. Virginia Tech dominated the stats, of course, but Mike Penner's transformation to Christine Daniels led the list. Upcoming plans include a light redesign and yet more blogs. Artley's memo also ranks the blogs that get the most visits:

April was a record-breaker in terms of traffic. According to Omniture, we had 76 million page views. That’s up 28% from this time last year and is most likely an all time high (I’m hedging because we have used different sources for statistics over time).

Why that happened:

You will see elements of our coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings on the traffic lists below. The high traffic is in part due to the magnitude of the tragedy, but also because our coverage was unique in many ways. In addition to updating the story throughout its many cycles, we gathered more than 1,200 reader comments, updated an interactive map of the shootings and built several photo galleries. We redesigned, on the fly, a piece of the homepage to highlight quotes from readers and treated those comments from around the world as a key part of the developing story, changing them every 15-20 minutes at times. We had video, some of it live. We had a blog-like sidebar that covered the reaction on the Web.

[snip]

Live blogging from the Spector trial continues. This is a shining example of how we thought about the story first and the format second. We could have built another page on the site with a long list of articles. Instead, we decided to take advantage of our Blackberried reporters inside the courtroom to update the blog, and we are streaming live video on to that very page. So the blog has become the home for all the activity and updates.

We launched some great blogs in April. The Lakers blog was temporarily knocked off its No. 1 perch by ShowTracker but in the end it held on, unlike the Lakers themselves. A real estate blog was launched, “LA Land,” as was “The Daily Mirror”, a historical look at crime in this city from our own Larry Harnisch. La Plaza, observations from our Latin America correspondents, became a blog. And while we’re on the topic of foreign, here’s a nice way to find out more about our bureaus around the world. Our own Christine Daniels can be found blogging on “Woman in Progress.” Speaking of Christine, guess who tops the list for the most viewed article of the month?

After the jump: The Times' Top 10 most-viewed blogs, stories, photo galleries and video.