Webmaster's Biannual Report: July 2008
Saturday, July 05, 2008
I'm happy to report that our Club's website has been
as busy as a, well, you know.
From January 1st of this year to July 4th we've had 1,795 visitors to the website. Out of those visitors 1,318 were first-time visitors and the remaining 477 were people who came back for another look. That's an average of about 7 new visitors to the website every day. Of course it doesn't really happen that way - we started off slow early in the year with only one or two visits per day. Our current best day was June 12th when we had 36 visitors.
Overall, about 74% of the visitors are first-timers and 26% are returning visitors. That's a good ratio because it means that we have lots of people finding their way to the site and having a look around, and a consistent number of people (most likely members) are coming back. Of those people returning to the site, 75% of them have been here up to 8 times previously and the remaining 25% have visited 9 to 100 times. (8 people have visited the site over 50 times! Ok, I admit that I'm probably one of them, but who are the other seven?)
Although the majority of our visitors come from the United States (93%), we do get visitors from all over the world. About 1% of visitors are from the United Kingdom, another 1% are from Canada, and the remaining 5% are from various locations everywhere else, like New Zealand (6 visitors).
So, how do visitors find our website? Well, about 20% of them have the website saved as a favorite and click directly to the site. About 30% get referred to the Club's website by another website, like the Club's old website or other sites like www.beekeeperlinda.blogspot.com (93 visitors came from Linda's website, so I returned the favor and posted a link to her site on ours). The remaining 50% of our visitors arrive here after using a search engine like Google or Yahoo. I intentionally embed into the website keywords that allow search engines to return our website high on a list of search results. You can try it for yourself: do a Google search for "long island beekeepers" or "long island bees" or "long island honey." Most likely the Club's website appears on the the first page of the search results.
The most popular pages on the website, other than the home page that people arrive at first, are the "Bee Pictures" page (please send me more pictures!), the "Meeting Schedule", the "Bee Swarm" page, and the "Local Honey" page (if you don't have your wares advertised on this page, then you're missing out).
Our website also generates a lot of emails. The Club's President, Corresponding Secretary, and Editor get their fair share of questions and comments about the Club or beekeeping in general. But by far, the most emails come through the website's "Bee Curious" page, where visitors have the opportunity to ask questions about bees and beekeeping. One of our Master Beekeepers, Ray Lackey, does an excellent job of responding to the many questions that are submitted by our visitors.
You're probably wondering how we get all this information. Hidden inside the website is a little program that gathers data about each visitor. That information is relayed to a database that collects and analyzes it all, and I periodically run reports to see how the website is performing. There's a lot more information available other than what I've summarized here (did you know that 82% of our visitors are using Windows and that the remaining 18% are Mac users?), but don't worry, we can't, and would not, gather names, addresses, and other personal information.
If you have questions or comments about the Club's website, feel free to send me an email at webmaster@longislandbeekeepers.org.
Time to get back to the hive - the girls are waiting.
From January 1st of this year to July 4th we've had 1,795 visitors to the website. Out of those visitors 1,318 were first-time visitors and the remaining 477 were people who came back for another look. That's an average of about 7 new visitors to the website every day. Of course it doesn't really happen that way - we started off slow early in the year with only one or two visits per day. Our current best day was June 12th when we had 36 visitors.
Overall, about 74% of the visitors are first-timers and 26% are returning visitors. That's a good ratio because it means that we have lots of people finding their way to the site and having a look around, and a consistent number of people (most likely members) are coming back. Of those people returning to the site, 75% of them have been here up to 8 times previously and the remaining 25% have visited 9 to 100 times. (8 people have visited the site over 50 times! Ok, I admit that I'm probably one of them, but who are the other seven?)
Although the majority of our visitors come from the United States (93%), we do get visitors from all over the world. About 1% of visitors are from the United Kingdom, another 1% are from Canada, and the remaining 5% are from various locations everywhere else, like New Zealand (6 visitors).
So, how do visitors find our website? Well, about 20% of them have the website saved as a favorite and click directly to the site. About 30% get referred to the Club's website by another website, like the Club's old website or other sites like www.beekeeperlinda.blogspot.com (93 visitors came from Linda's website, so I returned the favor and posted a link to her site on ours). The remaining 50% of our visitors arrive here after using a search engine like Google or Yahoo. I intentionally embed into the website keywords that allow search engines to return our website high on a list of search results. You can try it for yourself: do a Google search for "long island beekeepers" or "long island bees" or "long island honey." Most likely the Club's website appears on the the first page of the search results.
The most popular pages on the website, other than the home page that people arrive at first, are the "Bee Pictures" page (please send me more pictures!), the "Meeting Schedule", the "Bee Swarm" page, and the "Local Honey" page (if you don't have your wares advertised on this page, then you're missing out).
Our website also generates a lot of emails. The Club's President, Corresponding Secretary, and Editor get their fair share of questions and comments about the Club or beekeeping in general. But by far, the most emails come through the website's "Bee Curious" page, where visitors have the opportunity to ask questions about bees and beekeeping. One of our Master Beekeepers, Ray Lackey, does an excellent job of responding to the many questions that are submitted by our visitors.
You're probably wondering how we get all this information. Hidden inside the website is a little program that gathers data about each visitor. That information is relayed to a database that collects and analyzes it all, and I periodically run reports to see how the website is performing. There's a lot more information available other than what I've summarized here (did you know that 82% of our visitors are using Windows and that the remaining 18% are Mac users?), but don't worry, we can't, and would not, gather names, addresses, and other personal information.
If you have questions or comments about the Club's website, feel free to send me an email at webmaster@longislandbeekeepers.org.
Time to get back to the hive - the girls are waiting.