How do you know if a us site has any traffic at all?

Look, there are a million + sites out there. How do you know if one has any traffic or not? Well, there are a few ways. Subscribe to comScore (costs a lot) or hitwise (also costs a lot), or use free tools like quantcast & compete.

So, if you're actually looking at a site to "hang out" and want to know if they have any traffic or not, it's worth looking at an objective 3rd party resource before saying "it's huge" because lots & lots of sites lie about their numbers.

How would you go about finding out if a site is well known or not?

well since I hang out mostly in forums I normally check out the post frequency, shout box activity (if at hand) and the general "online" at the bottom.

I generally go for the more confined forums, the ones that have most of the same people posting and chatting.
you get to know the people there better.

another good way to find out how popular a site is, is to look at the server load times the longer it takes to get on the site the more people there are on it XD (this only applys to sites with middle server capacity)

The longer it takes to load something...well, generally means their tech isn't the best

Our load times are *not* incredible, but we benchmark against the best companies out there, and while we're not the best, we're not the worst either (which a credit to our tech team).

>post frequency, online at the bottom, etc

Should we add stuff like that someplace on our site? I know our /members page only shows people who are online, with photos...which is a bit misleading in terms of the number of people that are online at any given time.

Thanks for the answer.

 
Maybe on the Home Page under the Fun Features box on the left of the page you could place a box that simply stated the number of members currently on line.

Ted, I think that's a pretty cool idea.

fun advice has loads of members online at the same time, a box with people online would be quite confusing though you could get a counter which states how many guests and how many members, its not necessary to state all the members names.