The counter designs from 2006 outlasted the software
The rebuild came with an obvious temptation: throw out the counter graphics from 2006 and start clean. They are bitmaps. They are dated. Nobody would design them that way now.
They stayed. All of them.
The count
There are 393 designs on offer right now, and the split matters more than the total:
- 132 are the originals — the classic counter strips, panels and maps that have been here since 2006.
- 261 are new, drawn as SVG: sharp at any size, and a fraction of the weight of the images they sit beside.
Those figures are counted when you load this page rather than typed in when it was written, which is not the usual arrangement for a blog post. There is a reason: the first of them keeps going up, and that is not what anybody expects of a twenty-year-old set of bitmaps. More on that below.
The new ones come in families, because a counter should suit the page it goes on rather than shouting over it: minimal strips, badges, cards, pill shapes, terminal and odometer styles, rings, columns, retro and digital faces, and a futuristic family that is the only group that moves. There are also two invisible counters, for measuring without putting anything on the page at all.
Why the old ones stayed
Because somebody chose them.
A counter is not a component in a design system, it is a thing a person picked out for their page — sometimes twenty years ago, in many cases the same week they built the site. Replacing that with something more tasteful, uninvited, is not an upgrade. It is walking into somebody's house and rearranging the shelves.
There is a practical argument too, and it is the stronger one: the embed code from 2013 still works. Nothing needs re-pasting, no page needs editing, and nobody has to be told that their site broke because of a decision taken somewhere else. The classics gallery is open, and they can still be chosen today.
What was repaired
A number of the old designs had stopped working long before anyone noticed. They were querying database tables that had been replaced years earlier, and they simply returned nothing — which, as noted elsewhere, looks a lot like a counter showing a small number.
They are coming back in batches. The graph panel, the country maps and the chart styles were first; a further group followed, including designs that had to be taught to draw themselves again from scratch. In each case the queries were rewritten against the current tables and the charting code was recovered from an old backup rather than guessed at.
This is why the count of originals keeps rising. It is archaeology, not development, and it goes design by design.
What is not on the list
One design is still missing from the gallery: number 11. It is not deleted and it has not stopped working — it still renders today. It is held back because it leans on data from the previous version of this site that has not been checked through yet, and nothing gets offered as a working choice before it has been.
It had company until recently. The honest description of that group was always on hold rather than lost, and the rest of them have since made it back.
What this means in practice: if your counter already uses design 11, nothing happened to it. If you are choosing a new design, the ones in the gallery are the ones that have been verified, and the support form is there if it is not obvious which one replaces what you had.
The point of having that many
It is not choice for its own sake. A counter that matches the page it lives on gets kept; one that clashes gets removed within a week. The single most common reason a counter disappears from a site is not that the owner stopped caring about visitors — it is that the thing looked wrong.