Yesterday, I fulfilled a promise to my wife to go out to Parkwoods United Church and help her and some enthusiastic teens put together a plan for a revised website for their congregation. It was a good experience. I think they have a healthy plan, but one that will certainly have a lot of work cut out for them.
Inevitably, such planning brings me to look at our own website and give it a bit of a revision to help streamline things a little bit. People have asked me what sort of traffic this website really gets, and how do we know if it's really worthwhile to have.
Fortunately, the company that we "rent" our webspace from actually has tools to keep track of this kind of thing. After a year of having this website in operation, I can share a little bit of that information:
In the past year, we have averaged 193 "unique" visitors per month. A "unique" vistor means that we have had 193 different computers visit the website. That may mean one computer, one person, or one computer 2-3 people, or the opposite two computers, one person. The latter works when one person checks the website from two different computers. Regardless of which, the fact that 193 people per month on average come to see what Clarkson Road is up to means that we are getting a decent amount of traffic... especially when one considers the congregation with a total membership of approximately 235 members. Peak usage was in December 2006, at over 250 unique visitors, where this past July 2007 (not surprisingly) marked the low at 147 unique visitors. I imagine things will pick up again
The question is, how do we make the site better? We're looking for ways to streamline the front page, so it's not quite so cluttered... and yet the info that's needed is where people can easily find it! If you have any thoughts, by all means leave a comment on this blog!
John
