The Webmaster's Report

Statistics for February

Site Totals: (comparison with February 2010): Visits 19745 (19005) of which 5804 (4188) were repeat visits within the month; 3580 (2628) different pages were viewed, the total number of page views being 59360 54272)

The Editorial Blog: Three full blogs posted in the month - viewed  453 times.

The Guide to Old Hertfordshire: Visitors to "Map" page - 537.

Wikipedia: 391 (67) visits from 99 (28) different Wikipedia pages 

Emails: I have sent or received 138 personal emails of which about 18 were unanswered or pending at the end of the month - due to various difficulties  unconnected with the web site, and the malicious software which invaded the computer on the 26th February. The later meant that nothing was done in the last three days in the month when I had hoped to clear most of the email backlog.

Overall: A distinct improvement from last year, and when one allows for the fact that February is 3 days shorter than January, the is a small increase in usage and a slight movement to longer visits.

The Webmaster's Report

Statistics for January

Site Totals: (comparison with January 2010): Visits 19669 (20790) of which 4405 (4302) were repeat visits within the month; 3109 (2907) different pages were viewed, the total number of page views being 57090 (62915)

The Editorial Blog: Five blogs posted in the month - viewed  495 times. (Not available in January 2010)

The Guide to Old Hertfordshire: Visitors to "Map" page 609. (Not available in January 2010)

Find It: Used 758 times (502).

Wikipedia: 405 (62) visits from 106 (23) different Wikipedia pages 

Rogue Usage: In checking the web sites which access this one there are a lot of references to single pictures - in many cases as illustrations to blogs which "borrowed" the picture. However there are clearly a few busy sites which access pictures on a large scale. (This does not affect the number of visitors to this site - but does inflate the number of hits)  One site started accessing one particular photograph in December and has already has generated about 0.25 Gigabytes of bandwidth. Another site started up at the end of December, and was active during January, but has now been closed down by the ISP for terms of service violations. Looking back I found a third site made over 6000 accesses to pictures in December but these have now stopped (possibly one of my pictures used as a Christmas Card on the home page of a busy games site.)

Emails: I decided to try a new filing systems and address book to try and keep on top of my online correspondence. This shows that in January I have sent or received at least 155 personal emails. (This total does not include automatic mailings from genealogy web sites, etc. or the very larger number of messages I get about Hertfordshire items for sale on ebay). These involved contacts with over 65 different people or organisations. At the end of the month one unanswered query, and two more that need more work, which will be answered in the next few days. Four other emails are "pending" because further action is needed over a longer period.

Overall: While there has been a small decrease in overall visitor numbers. it should be remember that many of the visits are short ones from search engines such as Google (most of these will be little more than a quick glance at a single page). The figures suggest that the changes made in 2010 to attract the more active visitors are working well.

The Webmaster's Report

Site Statistics for 2010

On 31st December the Genealogy in Hertfordshire web site contained 3456 pages accessible from the home page and 6728 images. In addition there were about 100 pages/images accessible only from the Old Hertfordshire Google map. Including a small number of links from offline draft pages, etc., there were 57261 internal links and 2333 external links of which 231 were broken. (It is planned to try and repair as many as possible of these broken links early in 2011.)

     Over the year there were 230,063 visits to the site (average 630 per day), 657709 pages were viewed (1825 per day) and there were 3,852,848 hits (10,556 per day), totalling 125 Gbytes (0.34 per day). In an average month there were 4238 repeat visits and an average of 2759 different pages were visited at least once.

     These figures conceal a wide range of visitor profiles . About 75% of the visits come from search engines such as Google and, as anyone who uses Google will know, a significant number of these visits never get beyond a quick glance at the selected page. About 15 % come from links on other web sites (such as Wikipedia and Cyndi's List) and such users are far more likely to spend time on the relevant page, but may not be interested in exploring the site further. The final 10% come either from people who type in the URL or have it stored as a bookmark – and many of these will be regular users who may carry out extensive explorations of the site. In 2010 1463 visits lasted more than one hour. While the average number of pages per visit is 2.89, it is more informative to assume that all those who spent less than 30 seconds on the site as only visiting one page, and by adjusting the totals we find that other visitors averaged 9.11 pages per serious visit. This figure increased through the year from 8.43 pages in the first half to 9.70 in the second half.

     Four changes in the web site have been monitored using the statistics.

• The Guide to Old Hertfordshire started at the beginning of January and after a slow start visits to the home page have risen to 441 visits in December.

• The Editorial Blog was started in April and peaked at 771 visits in August when the bog was updated almost every day. The blog is now updated about weekly and there was a healthy 591 visits in December.  The introduction of the blog may be the reason why the number of pages viewed in serious visits increased by more that 10% over the course of the year.

• In the autumn I drew attention to the importance of using the Find It facility for looking for family names – and the uses of this facility leaped from an average of about 250 a month to a peak of over 700 in November.

• It was discovered that there were many broken links to this web site on Wikipedia. In November these broken links were tracked down and corrected, and some additional links were added. As a result the monthly number of visits from Wikipedia rose from 77 in October to 341 in December.