January 2, 2000 was the launch date of All About Vision, so 2009 marks the site’s 10th year of educating consumers about eye care, eyewear and eye health.

Quite a bit has changed.  In the site’s first month of operation, Netscape.com was the top referring site.  Yahoo and AltaVista supplied some traffic as well, but Google — now AAV’s biggest source of traffic — was nowhere to be found.

In January 2000, the most-visited page was AAV’s home page. Today, with visitors going directly from search engines to specific articles, the home page doesn’t even make the top 10.

LASIK & Vision Surgery and Contact Lenses were the most popular content sections; today they’re in the top four sections along with Eyeglasses and Eye Conditions & Diseases.

Windows 95 was used by 30% of visitors that month, and the Netscape browser by 39%.

The web server had it easy in January 2000; just under one million files were served.  By December of that year, server load had increased five-fold, and AAV had tallied about 800,000 visitors for the year.

The new Cataract Surgeon Directory on All About Vision is now live.