Cases

One case is up: this atlas, two days in. It is the site you are reading, measured on itself.

This page is the bar the next case has to clear, and it holds the form to send one in.

What a case has to contain

• A starting point. Where the project stood before: traffic, signups, revenue. Zero is fine — zero is usually the honest answer.
• Numbers with a date and a source. Say which panel you read each figure off, and say on what day you read it.
• What did not work. The dead ends, in the order you walked them, because without them I cannot tell a case from an ad. Neither can anybody else.
• The move you would not repeat. It worked once because of the timing, or a launch, or somebody’s mood, and it will not work a second time.
• A link to the project, so the reader can open it and check.

What does not go up

• A launch announcement. “We are live” is news, and I have nowhere to put news.
• A growth chart with no dates and no scale on the axis.
• A ratio with no base under it. Tripled from what, over how long.
• Advice with no project behind it: if you did not run it, nobody can check it.

How to send yours

Open the case template. It asks for the project, the numbers with a source for each, and the dead ends, and it takes about ten minutes if you have the dashboards open.

Your voice stays as you wrote it: guest pages carry voice: guest in frontmatter, and nobody rewrites them into the house voice, but the facts get checked exactly as they are everywhere else here.

The terms are in CONTRIBUTING: CC BY 4.0, your byline, a link to your project.

Why there is only one

The rest of my numbers are still coming in. I would rather publish them a month late than round them off into something that reads well, because a case written before the data arrives breaks the first rule on this page.

Until the next case lands, the measurements live on the pages that produced them. Section by section, along the route.