There is a huge variety of cusotmization options out there now. Thousands and thousands of skins. But even now, the most common thing to be found on a "skinning" site is typically a wallpaper.

On every major Windows customization site wallpapers were the most common. Even here where they are moderated heavily.

What is interesting is that different sites have successfully catered to different groups of users.

Here are the stats (rough estimates)

Skinbase
Skins: ~3300
Walls: 2038
Other: ~200
Wall to skin ratio: 0.6 walls to every skin

WinCustomize
Skins: ~6150
Walls: 2129
Other: ~750
Wall to skin ratio: 0.34

deviantART
Skins: ~11,400
Walls: ~105,000
Other: ~433,300
Wall to skin ratio: 9.2 walls to every skin

DeskMod
Skins: ~2700
Walls: 6814
Other: ~2900
Wall to skin ratio: 2.5 walls for every skin

Dominant Skins:

deviantART: Winamp (24% of skins), WindowBlinds (7% of skins)

Skinbase: Winamp (9% of skins), WindowBlinds (9% of skins)

WinCustomize: WindowBlinds (31% of skins), DesktopX (23% of skins)

Deskmod: Winamp (25% of skins), WindowBlinds (4% of skins).

So on the 4 surveyed sites, WinAmp was the most popular skinnable program on 3 of them and WindowBlinds the second most populra on 3 of them. Not suprisingly on the 4th site (this one) WindowBlinds was #1 since this is the official site for it and DesktopX was #2 (also the official site for DesktopX).

I don't know what conclusions to draw from this other than the obvious fact that as popular as skins are, wallpapers really rule the day. I haven't done any work on looking at download counts yet to see what is the most popular with users but clearly we can see what's the most popular with artists.

LogonStudio RC 6 is now available. It's a program that lets you apply and create your own logon screens for Windows XP.

It uses the .logonXP format and can import logonui.exe files. .logonxp files are both smaller and safer (it's amazing that someone who wouldn't click on a .exe attachment in their email will happily replace their logonui.exe with one downloaded off the Internet).

Best of all - it's free! (www.logonstudio.com).

The site shoudl hopefully feel somewhat faster as we now have more bandwidth.

Slowness at this point would be related to CPU resources.

One of the nice things about that little Hitbox thingy at the bottom of the pages is that it is able to use cookies to determine how many unique visitors this site receives as opposed to the more generic and inflated "user sessions".

In August, WinCustomize climbed to over 1 million unique visitors for the first time. Think about that a MILLION different people visited the site. It's still a far cry from say Yahoo that gets something like 30 million unique people on per month. But then again, we're not a search engine. Skinning has gone mainstream.

And the results are breath taking. Take a look at some of the skins that came out (and this is just a quick look):

Sportsman (Alexandrie): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/Alexandrie/wb/sportsman.jpg

Alien Mind (APB): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/APB/wb/ss_AlienMind.jpg

Dynamo (Aleksyandr): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/Aleksyandr/wb/Dynamo.jpg

There's a hard core base of around 50,000 people who visit the site every day with another 50,000 who visit the site a few times per week.

Most of them are using Windows XP.

Referral wise, excluding search engines Stardock represented 82% of referrals. The other skin sites (deviantART, Deskmod, ArtUpRoar, Skinbase, etc.) accounted for 2%.

Other community sites such as Neowin, Betanews, TweakXP, ICQPlus, and others accounted for 7%. 9% of referrals came from other sources (like TechTV, Avault, etc).

While it's obviously been a good summer for Stardock's apps, it's been a good summer for Litestep, Winamp, Windows Media Player and even PocketPC apps like Dashboard (Snoopsoft is now the #2 NON-SD referral).

Site-wise the age old problems still remain - bandwidth and CPU resources. The bandwidth problem is being taken care of thanks to a deal worked out with Betanews where we're leasing some of their bandwidth. We'll now be able to fulfill one of our long term goals of being able to provide backup to skin authors - we keep 2 copies of a skin in real time so if one server goes down, the skin is on another server still and we can pick and choose which server to download from based on bandwidth availability.

But it's actually CPU that's most problematic right now. Barring clustering (easier on paper than in reality), when you have several hundred people on the site at the same time, it creates strains on the servers. We're working on distributing this out more but it'll take time.

Thankfully we're able to even do this because of the early success of the new WinCustomize subscriptions. Thank you to everyone who has purchased one! Feel free to get one at https://www.wincustomize.com/store.asp

As we move towards Fall things wil likely pick up further. Lots of exciting things coming up in terms of new software.

The first WinCustomize subscriber premium suite ought to be ready in the next few weeks along with premium Icon sets and WindowBlinds visual styles which we think will not only help the site but help skin authors justify the time they put into this stuff (which in turn will create even more skins and themes for users to freely download).

Have fun!

August broke the million unique people visiting the site mark for the first time.

Using hitbox, we can tell how many unique individuals actually visit the site (as opposed to user sessions which is always much higher).

In August we broke the 1 million mark.

And there's a solid 40,000 or so who visited the site several times per day.

I've been writing a series of articles for Avault (www.avault.com) about how do websites make money in the post dot-com world. I was curious as to what you guys think websites can or should do.

Here's what I've found so far:

Ways websites can make money:

1) Advertising. The tried and true way just doesn't pay enough anymore. Even if you put a bunch of annoying pop-up ads, they'll not likely pay for your site unless your bandwidth use is miniscule and it's run by volunteers.

2) Donations. This can work but at a price - your users will basically expect to own your soul as Kuro5hin.org discovered. And had to go non-profit to do it.

3) Selling "stuff". This can help but is often (in my limited experience) more trouble than it's worth.

The article I juts finished is about website subscriptions. I actually think this could be the wave of the future but only when done correctly.

Rules that subscription sites need to follow:

a) Target core users (Which requires identifying what core users do on your site) not casual users.

Similar to (a), don't limit your site in any way that annoys casual users. The basic site should do what it does very well.

c) Don't sell the site's content (even if you make it). The subscription should be about making it more convenient or faster to access that content.

d) Don't get greedy, charge just what you need to pay for the site plus a reasonable profit. This means you will want to seriously know how much the
site really costs. Too many early subscriptions cost ridiculous amounts.

I think when put together some sites will be able to pay their bills. But I think the jury is out whether these methods will provide a generally viable business model.

What do you think?

This article at WebmasterMac comopares MacOS X and Windows XP. The conclusions you can largely ignore since many of matters of taste and the pro-Mac bias is considerable. But it is useful to see the two compared head to head in features and usability.

What do you think?

65% of our users who responded to the OS in use poll answered that they use Windows XP.

16% said Windows 2000 giving the two a combined total of 81%!

Given that these two OSes are only in use by a minority of users in the general public, it is safe to assume that people who are into customizing their computers are much more likely to have Windows XP.

Now, what is the reason for this? I can think of two basic reasons:

1) People into customization simply tend to have the latest/greatest version of Windows. The only problem with this assumption is that our other poll on hardware showed that most people on this site don't have the latest/greatest hardware.

2) That people who try out customization software like WindowBlinds, DesktopX, Winamp, etc. tend to have a much better experience with it if they're running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. That is, people who run Windows 98Frogboy are much more likely to have these customizing programs perform less than optimal and hence they don't continue to use them whereas WinXP/2K users have good experiences with them and end up sticking to them.

Regardless of the reason, Windows XP really seems to have boosted the skinning movement. This month may be WinCustomize's best month ever in traffic (it's going to be very close).

Okay, in theory if we wanted to have some sort of show/party for the community, where would be the ideal place?

This past weekend, the Lockergnome people had "Gnomedex" which I thought was a pretty good idea. The only downside is that it was in Iowa which means it's somewhat expensive to fly there and out of the way for just about everyone (though Karmagirl went!).

So if you were in charge of it, where would you want to have it?

I was looking at the latest MacOS screenshots and realized that why should only Bill Gates and Steve jobs have all the fun?

What if we had a little contest to let people mock up what their dream desktop OS would be. It wouldn't have to use any existing software, it would be a total mockup of if you had the power to create the perfect operating system, what would it be like?

To the winners, we can see what developers in the community (including Stardock or whoever else) might be interested in trying to turn that person's vision into a reality?

What do you think?