February 6, 2010 – 14 web sites with a Marina City connection have entered the new year with estimated traffic rankings shuffled slightly from last fall.

skyscrapercity.com, operated by Marina City resident Jan Klerks, and hotelsaxchicago.com held onto the first and second spots. However, marinacityonline.com fell from third to fifth place.

Chicago Carless, the blog of east tower resident Mike Doyle, replaced MCO in third place, while the web site of BIN 36 moved up to fourth place.

According to the web analysis company Alexa, which bases traffic estimates on data collected from users of its toolbar and other sources over three months, there were about the same number of unique visitors to skyscrapercity.com but traffic was down significantly at the Hotel Sax site. Although still ranked second, it went from the 650,985th most popular web site to 1,325,569th.

The most dramatic increase was at marina-city.com, the web site of Marina Management Company, a real estate brokerage firm. Redesigned recently, the site went from a rank of almost 14 million to 3.2 million, which would put it in the top two percent of all web sites.

Brian Muir, president of Marina Management Company, says the redesigned site has been received well by clients and prospective tenants. “It has been key in our renting out a number of Marina City apartments and drumming up buyer interest during a normally slow season.”

Site	Alexa rank (Jan 2010)	Alexa rank (Oct 2009)
1. skyscrapercity.com	2,004	1,976
2. hotelsaxchicago.com	1,325,569	650,985
3. chicagocarless.com	1,405,872	1,672,820
4. bin36.com	1,693,512	1,954,083
5. marinacityonline.com	1,752,697	1,551,296
6. architechgallery.com	2,090,122	2,403,895
7. lynnbecker.com	2,473,333	3,167,982
8. 10pinchicago.com	2,861,056	2,150,071
9. amanochicago.com	2,887,428	2,825,082
10. marina-city.com	3,267,803	13,953,032
11. mymtca.com	7,811,527	NA
12. mascontext.com	9,297,362	(NEW)
13. vpfalk.net	10,736,321	6,439,438
14. bertrandgoldberg.org	16,045,593	14,923,641

The Hotel Sax web site was also redesigned recently, after Thompson Hotel Associates was hired in December to manage the hotel.

New on the list is MAS Context, a quarterly journal of urban issues edited by Marina City resident Iker Gill.

marinacitychicagogiftshopgallery.com and landmarkmarinacitynow.org did not have enough traffic to be ranked by Alexa. They did have enough traffic three months ago to be ranked in the last two spots.

The web site of Marina Towers Condominium Association, mymtca.com, surfaced, taking a spot in 11th place.

Draper & Kramer’s web site, dkcondo.com, which serves 82 associations including Marina Towers, had an Alexa rank of 4,219,311, down from 2,246,810 three months ago.

Because they are sub-domains, Alexa cannot rank chicago.dickslastresort.com, chicago.transwestern.net, or marinawatchdog.blogspot.com.

Marina City Online recently built an improved portal to Marina Watchdog, the blog for Marina City residents. From January 13 to February 5, according to Google Analytics, the portal was used 392 times by 260 unique visitors. Meanwhile, Google calculated 4,269 visits to Marina City Online in January, down from 4,781 in December.

According to the Internet services company Netcraft, there were 206 million web sites in January 2010. The top three sites, according to Alexa, are currently google.com, facebook.com, and yahoo.com.