In early December 2009, I got a call from a prospective client who wanted me to build a website for her husband's home improvement business. The catch? She wanted it to be a surprise Christmas present! She started collecting pictures from his clients and I went to work with a simple but expandable WordPress site. Reports are that Brad was thrilled!
See it live: http://www.bradleywinkler.com/
Metropolis is a "news, analysis and commentary" site from veteran Philadelphia reporter Tom Ferrick (Wikipedia). An alum of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tom's spent the last half-dozen years talking to everyone who will listen about the future of print and Philly news. He's done talking and is showing what can be done on a budget budget. From "This is Metropolis," the lead article:
Local newspapers, TV and radio stations are retreating from in-depth coverage of regional news either due to economic or audience considerations.
The retreat has been gradual, but no one expects it to stop. The company that owns the region's largest newspapers - the Inquirer and Daily News - is in bankruptcy. The size of the editorial staffs at the papers continues to shrink. The prognosis for metro dailies here and elsewhere is not good. The journalism practiced by these papers is still robust, but the economic model that has sustained it is eroding. If these traditional sources of news falter or fail what will take their place?
The site was built in Movable Type. The most prominent feature is the slideshow display of featured articles. Tom has seen a similar effect on another journalism site and a search found the "Sliding Horizontal Banner Rotator" at Active Den, a great site to purchase pre-built Flash files. Movable Type entries are outfitted with custom fields to enter images and links. Movable Type then creates a custom XML file for the "Main Stories" feed, which is then picked up and displayed by the Flash banner. In addition, the site uses Google Adsense to provide income.
Visit: Philadelphia Metropolis
SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.The blog asks "how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO?" I've been doing a lot more optimization for clients lately. What's particularly fun is running across the work of the SEO scam artists their competition have brought in. I've seen many instances where the other SEO firm has stepped over the bounds of fair practice and been penalized by Google.
For example, if you're currently running ads on the broad-matched keyword web hosting, your ads may show for the search queries web hosting company or webhost. The keyword variations that are allowed to trigger your ads will change over time, as the AdWords system continually monitors your keyword quality and performance factors. Your ads will only continue showing on the highest-performing and most relevant keyword variations.You can disable these broad searches using negative keywords (i.e., "-frisbee") and with specific keywords ("boomerang").
Via 37Signal's Signals vs. Noise blog I came across a fascinating post written by Brian Fling of Blue last year on pricing a project. I'd like to talk about it and to explain my own philosophy. First a extended quote from Brian:
I find it funny... in a sad sort of way, that we often start out our partnership with bluffing, no one saying what they are really thinking... how much they are willing to pay and how much it should cost... Though every book I've read on the topic of pricing says to never ever ballpark, I have a tendency to do so. If they can't disclose the budget I typically try to start throwing a few numbers from previous projects to help gauge the scope of what we are talking about, call it a good faith effort to start the discussion... While this is very awkward part of the discussion it is almost always followed by candor. It's as if once someone starts telling the truth, it opens a door that can't be closed.
I completely agree that candor is the only way to work with clients. Maybe it's the Quaker influence: we reportedly pioneered fixed pricing back when everyone haggled, with the philosophy that charging true costs were the only honest way of doing business. My official rates and contact page includes my list of "typical costs" -- essentially these are the "ballpark estimates" that Brian talks about.
When I put together estimates I base it on my best-guess informed estimates. I start by tabulating the client's requested features and determining how I'll achieve them. I then estimate how long it will take me to implement each feature and use that to determine a first-guess for project cost. I then compare it to past projects, to make sure I'm being realistic. I know myself well enough to know I always want to underestimate costs--I usually like the project and want to make it affordable to clients!--so I do force myself a reality check that usually ends up adding a few hours to the estimate.
When I put together my official estimate I try to guess where potential bottlenecks might happen. Sometimes these are technical issues and something they're more social. For example, a client might be very particular about the design and the back-and-forth can take longer than expected. If I think anything like this might happen I mention it in the estimate. Sometimes as we work through the details of a feature I'll learn that the client wants some enhancement that we hadn't talked about previously and which I didn't factor into the estimate.
When I do see a particular part of the work taking longer than expected I flag it with the client. I try to keep them informed that this will add to total costs. In many cases, clients have been happy to go with the extra work: I simply want to make sure that we both are aware that the estimate is changing before the work happens.
I charge by the hour rather than on a per-project basis since I find it to be a much more open business model. Brian Fling's post agrees:
The problem [with per-project billing is that] one way or another somebody loses, either the client pays too much, meaning paying more than it's market value, or the vendor eats into their profit... One benefits to hourly billing is the client is responsible for increases of scope, protecting the vendor and the customer. If the project is completed early the client pays less, protecting the client. This puts the onus on both parties to communicate regularly and work more effectively.
I have very little overhead: a home office, laptop and DSL. This means my rates are very competitive (one client described it as "less than plumbers and electricians charge, more than the kid who mows the lawn"). Being very careful with estimates mean that I often communicate a lot with clients before I "start the clock." I've often worked with them a few hours before the estimate is in and we're moving forward and of course some of this un-billed work doesn't result in a job.
Putting together fabulous websites is fun work. It's very much a back-and-forth process with clients, and it's often impossible to know just what the site will look like and just how it will work until the site actually launches. Half of my clientele have never had websites before, making the work even more interesting! It's my professional responsibility to make sure I work with clients to foresee costs, dream big, but most of all to be open and honest about costs as the process unfolds.
Suspecting
we were losing a large potential audience, I redesigned the site so
Google could index each and every meeting (adding a few tricks so each
listing traded links with half-a-dozen other listings). Once the change
was in effect (help from our programmer), those old generic search
phrases were still the most popular. But now we got small numbers of
visits on thousands of terms which we hadn't hit before: "Quakers
Poughkeepsie" and "Quaker Churches in San Francisco," etc. This was the
long tail in effect. Our visits jumped fourfold within a few months
(see chart). The long tail made us much more visible. (More on the Googlization effort in that year's analytic report.)When I wrote this in the Fall of 2004, I was working as the webmaster for Friends General Conference, the US/Canadian denominational body for the liberal branch of unprogrammed Quakers. As webmaster, I felt that one of my most important responsibilities was to understand how religious seekers use the internet and how our nonprofit organization could benefit from understanding these patterns.
My 2004 report on the three FGC websites touched on a lot of these issues. I offer it here because I hope it can give other nonprofit and denominational websites some ideas about how to measure their site's use. Too often we put up websites without any follow-up analysis of their use. You just can't make an effective website like this and if your work is ministry you don't want its reach constrained by minor navigational design issues. Please feel free to use the comment page to start a discussion on any of these issues.
Report for FGC Central Committee, October 2004
By Martin Kelley, webmaster
It's important to start off with a little editorial about why we need reports like this. We put up a website and we know people use it. Why bother spending time collecting data?
The internet is simultaneously vague and precise. We can say definitively that the FGC website received 114,097 "unique visitors" in the past fiscal year. But how many people does that represent? Is that a high number or low number? How did these users react when they came to the site. Did they think to themselves "whoops, not what I want" and leave, or did they go "wow, what's this FGC?, hey this is great." LESSON: We need data to know if the site is being used well.
Everyone who reads this report is by definition an insider. None of us are able to step into the shoes of an unknowledgeable seeker. In my study of usage patterns, I have found that the differences in website use between Quaker insiders and seekers is so great that they might as well be looking at different websites, if not different media altogether (see How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net. Because of this gap we cannot design the site based on whims or personal preferences. It is incredibly difficult to imagine how newcomers might navigate the site. We can only consider the design of the site after we've examined in usage, both in detail (actual users moving through the site) and in aggregate (pages and links visited over periods of time). See also: How to measure the peace movement. LESSON: We can only effectively design the site if we incorporate sophisticated and detailed data about how the site is being used.
By far the most significant change in our websites over the past year has been the "googlization" of Quakerbooks and Quakerfinder, both of which now have over four times the visitors they were getting last year.
The Google Problem: Both Quakerbooks and Quakerfinder have had great content from their start. The former lists the entire inventory of FGC's bookstore, along with book descriptions and reader commentary. The latter has our list of meetings--addresses, worship times, and contact information. But on both sites the bulk of the content was locked up in databases. Before users could benefit from the sites, they had to find them. This limited much of the use to people who already know about FGC and our resources. Because internet search engines can't search website databases (a problem known as the hidden or deep web), they could index only a limited number of pages on these sites and they made referrals on only the most generic search phrases (e.g., "quaker bookstore" "quaker meeting directory").
We made various changes to both sites (technical details below) that have made them searchable by Google and the other search engines, which now return our sites for very specific search queries, e.g., "Quakers in conflict Ingle" and "Quakers Poughkeepsie".
A Wider, More Inclusive Audience: What's great is that this has given us not just a bigger audience, but our target audience. Most of these visitors don't know enough about how Friends are organized to even know where to look for information. With Quakerfinder and Quakerbooks, we're now be visible on their terms.
We're giving them the basic information they're seeking and we're doing it when they are actively seeking it. This last point is important. I spend a lot of time watching how people use websites. If you email someone out of the blue with a link to a website, they might follow it but only half-heartedly. They might be doing five other things at the same time and they rarely stay to full use the website's resources. When someone comes to a site via a search engine they're much more likely to look around: this is the visit that they are initiating because they have something specific they're trying to find.
Having a "googlified" Quakerfinder means we're actually reaching people who are ready to try out a Quaker meeting and we're giving them that most basic information that's often hard to find. With a searchable Quakerbooks we're selling books to people who might not even have thought about Quakers as a possible spiritual path. I suspect that both sites are doing more outreach about Quakerism than any of us expect.
Update, 11/29/04: I recently met someone who came to Friends after reading the Quaker entry in Wikipedia. He had gone through the list of religious denominations in the U.S. till he found one that spoke to his condition. In the past month FGC has gotten 57 visitors from Wikipedia.
In the official committee report I tried to steer clear of too many technical details since I wanted people to read it. So I'll expand on them here on the website version.
Unique Domains: I don't think it really helped to give Quakerfinder.org and Quakerbooks.org their own domains, at least initially. In last year's report I noted that most of the traffic to those sites came from the main FGCQuaker.org site and that the separate domains weren't particularly useful. Now the sites do have their own sort of identity, thanks to the "googlization," which was a different process for the two sites.
Quakerbooks.org: Visitors to the Quakerbooks.org site are given session IDs to allow us to follow along with them as they make their selections. Since some users don't allow cookies, this ID sometimes appears in the URL (it appears as something like "?sessionid=1514" appended to the end of the address). Google really hates session IDs because its automated software doesn't know if the different URLs are different pages (to be indexed separately) or merely different sessions looking at the same page. So Googles just ignores anything that looks like this. The easiest fix is to have the software look to see if the visitor is Google and take of the session IDs (Google is okay with this workaround; I also used this method to allow them to index my Nonviolence.org discussion board.)
Quakerfinder: On Quakerfinder.org, the problem was that visitors had to type in a zip code to get to any of the content. Google's not that interactive and only follows links. Until recently, it thought there was only three pages to the site. To fix this we set up an alternative way to navigate the site: from the homepage you can now follow a link to lists of Quaker Meetings by state. The zip code lookup is so much more convenient that we don't suspect many live people will look up by state, but Google will and because of this it now lists 808 pages on the site. Now Google acts as a alternate lookup service, one that doesn't depend on people finding our site beforehand.
The basic measure used to measure website traffic is that of the "unique visitor," which counts user sessions. Here are this year's comparisons to last year's. Numbers represent the monthly average "unique visitors" to each of our three websites.
Site FY 03/04 total FY 02/03 total Increase
FGCQuaker.org 114,097 82,747 38%
Quakerfinder.org 48,084 23,964 100%
Quakerbooks.org 69,924 19,332 262%
The last two sites have truly remarkable jumps. The numbers are a little misleading, however, as the increase in traffic hasn't been gradual but sudden and climbing. Compare the last full month (September 2004) with the same month the previous year and all three sites have higher jumps.
Site Sept 04 Sept 03 Increase
FGCQuaker.org 9459 8254 15%
Quakerfinder.org 8782 1997 340%
Quakerbooks.org 7498 1611 366%
While the internet grows in use every year, the increases on Quakerfinder and Quakerbooks represent a quantum leap over that incremental increase. They represent "search engine optimization" of those sites, or what we all refer to the "googlization" of the sites.
One way of measuring the visibility of a website is to count how many other webpages link to it. Here are
Site October 2004 October 2003 Increase
FGCQuaker.org 496 396 25%
Quakerfinder.org 196 46 326%
Quakerbooks.org 151 96 57%
For comparison: Quaker.org is up to 11,900 links, Phila. Yearly Meeting is 248, PendleHill.org is 420, FCNL.org is 10,200, Nonviolence.org is 20,900 and AFSC.org is 21,800. See Miscellaneous & Notes at end to see how numbers were obtained. See How Can We Measure the State of the Peace Movement? for more on this method of measurement.
Use of FGCQuaker.org
continues to grow at a good clip. We have a 38% increase this fiscal
year compared with last's. The site received over 114,000 unique
visitors from October 1, 2003 to September 30, 2004.
To the right is the chart showing unique visitors by month for the past three years:
In September 2004, there were 9459 "unique visits" to the FGCQuaker.org site, still our most-visited site. Here's where they came from.
1021 from Quakerfinder.org. One surprise this year is the jump in Quakerfinder-referred visits. This is due of course to the phenomenal visibility of that site. In a recent one-month period, FGCQuaker received 983 visits from Quakerfinder links, two-thirds of which came from the "googlized" Quakerfinder pages. About one in ten visitors are now coming to FGCQuaker through Quakerfinder. Up 288% from last year.
842 from Google. We get a lot of Google traffic because we have a lot of content on our site: dozens of pamphlets, years worth of FGConnections, large parts of the old Fostering Vital Friends Meetings resource binder. Visitors via search engines often don't know FGC exists but they want to know about our programs and work. Because FGC does such great work (and because we publicize it online!), many of our resources answer questions people have. I think this is great outreach.
Here's an example. This Spring I noticed that we were getting visits
on fairly generic searches for racism. Here's a list of search
inquiries that brought people to the CMR pages on FGC:
"ending racism"
"racially diverse communities"
"quaker racial diversity"
"diversity in friends"
"ethnic diversity"
"responsibilities to racism"
"pastoral care racism"
"activities for ending racism"
"testimonies racial unity"
This is a fascinating list precisely because these are generic searches. People aren't looking for "Quakers ending racism," they're looking for anyone "ending racism" and Google is bringing them to us (we're number 6 on that search term). This is surprising: I would think the much bigger denominations would all have committees ending racism that would come up higher just because of their larger institutional clout. That we are so high suggests that this work is not as common as I we might hope and that Friends might have the opportunity to play a role in larger faith dialogues.
When people use search engines, they get results from all over the FGC website. Searches might pull up some four-year article on FGConnections, or one of the "Friends And..." pamphlets that we've put online. Google up 12% from last year. There were about 83 more visits from regional Google sites.
434 from Quaker.org. Most of these people are coming directly from the Quaker.org homepage to the FGCQuaker.org homepage. I estimate that about 60% of these visitors leave the FGC site without clicking on any links. They're probably just superficially curious about us, but not enough to look around the site. Up 39% from last year.
253 from other search engines: 118 from Yahoo (118), MSN (74), AOL (42), Ask (19).
81 from Beliefnet. Beliefnet has a popular "Belief-o-Matic" quiz that will magically tell you what religious faith you should join. It's rigged in such a way that a lot of people unexpectedly come up as Quaker. The qui zthen directs people to an information page on Friends, which includes some links to FGC. Most of the Beliefnet visitors are coming from that information page directly to the FGC homepage. Up 200% from last year.
69 from UVa's Religious Movements site. This is a pretty good description of Quakerism
60 from Quakerbooks. Our own bookstore website attracts a lot of new people who aren't part of the established Quaker networks and many of them first learn of FGC this way.
53 from Religious Tolerance. A popular website from a Canadian Unitarian that profiles religions..
52 from QuakerInfo.org. This is the Philadelphia Quaker Information Center, a joint project of a number of Quaker organizations, including FGC.
Top Destinations in September 04:
* To the homepage: 2396;
* Library's "Welcome to Quakerism" pages: 463;
* A&O "Resources for Meetings": 320 (prominently linked from Quakerfinder);
* Gathering pages: 309;
* "Silent Worship Quaker Values" tract on the Library section;
* Gathering's pictures from last year: 149;
* Religious Ed: 149;
* FGConnections articles: 129;
* Ideas for First Day School": 127;
* Advancement & Outreach homepage: 124;
* Young Quakes: 118;
* Publications: 100;
* Development 97.
These are pretty typical numbers. The only significant variation over the year comes in Spring, when traffic to the Gathering pages goes up. In May 2004, 961 people visited the Gathering homepage, and 355 visited the workshop listings.
So far I've looked at tallied-up numbers: how many people visited, how many pages were looked at. The problem with this sort of statistic is that it doesn't give us a feel for how individuals are actually using the site. Looking at usage explodes the preconceptions that many of us "Insider Quakers" might bring to the web.
The first lesson: most people don't come into our site via the FGC homepage. Even more shocking: close to half never even see the homepage! This blew me away when I first realized it. We spend so much time designing the homepage and wondering how we're going to direct seekers from it but a lot of this work is in vain.
Of that 45% or so that enter the site via the FGC homepage, most of them leave the site immediately without following any link whatsoever.
Let's splice this another way: 70% of the people who hit our site (wherever they enter) don't look at any page other than that first one. They don't click on anything but the back button.
What are some of the lessons on this: one is that content is all important. Those majority of visitors who bypass the homepage to parachute directly inside the site are coming for specific information. Many of them don't know anything about FGC and most of them don't care to learn about FGC the organization. They're looking for some specific piece of information on Quakers ("painting of Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society Quakers" and "Quakers prison reform"), or on religious education in general ("religious meeting"), or on how churches are dealing with racism ("racial diversity" and "do blacks worship with only blacks"). These are all search phrases that have brought visitors to FGCQuaker.org. So it's great that we have our pamphlets online and FGConnections and RE materials and A&O brochures. There are hundreds of pages on our site, most of which we probably forget are there, but Google knows them and will display them up when the query is right.
Another lesson is that we shouldn't rely on our homepage to help visitors navigate. We shouldn't even worry much about using how its design will work for both insiders and seekers: most of the seekers never even go there. Most of the people coming to the FGC homepage are looking for FGC the organization.
Committee Page Case Study: One committee, Advancement & Outreach, is considering redesigning their committee page. In preparation I've looked at the usage and I think it makes a good case study. The A&O committee gets the most visible link on the FGC Homepage (top left, it gets this position because the committee list is alphabetical). Despite this prominence, almost no visitors actually follow this link. Only 1.5% of visitors to the FGCQuaker.org site ever get to the A&O homepage and even at that it's the most visited committee page on our site!
Most of the visitors that did get to the A&O page left without clicking on anything. It is safe to say that most of those visitors didn't thoroughly read through the page. The most-followed link is the first one, for the "Inreach/Outreach" review. In the one-month period I examined only 9 people followed this link! This doesn't mean A&O material isn't used: Quakerfinder is very successful and the pamphlet "Resources for Local meetings" is popular. And over 300 people in this month came to some part of the A&O site. Committee pages are useful for the relative trickle of Quaker insiders who visit the page, but we should focus more on the content committees are producing.
The lesson is clear: visitors are primarily looking for 1) good useful content from the "Quaker Library" resources and 2) practical information about the Gathering. Pages about committees and internal FGC workings are not well used. We need to continue the focus on practical resources. We also have to accept that people will not be looking at what we think they should be looking at. Through these visits we will slowly build up FGC's reputation but many people only dimly know what they're looking at.
In my official FGC report, I only hinted at the differences between institutional websites and focused online new media sites.
One surprising find that didn't make it into the report is that the three most-viewed pages on my own Quaker Ranter site were seen by more people than all but the two most-viewed FGC pages. The most viewed pages on FGCQuaker are the homepage and the Welcome to Quakerism page. Three of the pages on "Quaker Ranter" are seen by more people than any other page on the FGC website. FGC's Religious Education and Advancement and Outreach and Publications pages all are more obscure than my homepage or my "resources on plain dress" directory.
Institutional websites by their very nature have too many conflicting audiences and too timid a voice to act as much more than a reference resource. The Friends General Conference website is probably more friendly to seekers than most other institutional websites out there but even it gets a lot of people hitting the "back" button as soon as they hit the homepage.
Religious seekers are looking for individual voices with something to say and I suspect new media seeker websites will only become more important as time goes on. I suspect this will come as a surprise to institutional insiders as it happens. Sort of relatedly, see my Peace and Twenty-Somethings for some of the generational aspects of this shift. My Books and Media section collects similar sorts of essays.
One more piece in this: the FGC websites didn't get a lot of blog traffic. If all I were was the webmaster of Friends General Conference, I'd assume that all this blog talk in the media was hype. But as the "Quaker Ranter" I know that a popular blog and/or personal site can get a lot of readers. The lesson here is that there's little cross-over. Blogs seem to send little traffic to institutional websites and vice versa (actually institutional websites can't really send people to bloggers for a variety of reasons). I've had a number of people read my blog and declare they'll be coming to the next FGC Gathering so I know personal blogs can help raise organization profiles but that interest doesn't manifest itself as an immediately-followed link. I suspect the community being formed by the blogs is far more important than the raw number of referral links.
The
first of our two sites to be "googlified" was Quakerbooks.org. I had
long hoped to have our book listings show up on the search engines,
especially since we carry a lot of hard-to-find ones. I had opened up
the discussion board of my peace site to Google and been happy with the
results.
Back in early 2003 we installed new software by Steve Beuret to power the bookstore website, one that would allow easy transfer of information between the website and our inventory program. The website could now list whether a book was in stock, and orders would go directly into the system (no more retyping them!). Once the new system was running smoothly, I emailed Steve about optimizing it for Google. There were two parts to this: having the books show up (Steve) and linking them in such a way that Google would index them properly (me). It took awhile to get ito all working but on December 17, 2003 Google came through and indexed the site.
The most visited pages are the introductory ones:
The search phrases that are bringing in visitors used to be generic ("quaker bookstore") they now are very specific. September's list is typical:
I knew we'd show up high in the Google rankings for obscure books but I've been pleased that we're right up there with Amazon and Barnes and Noble even with mainstream books.
Our online best sellers are pretty
The bookstore inventory software is not very good at pulling marketing statistics. While it's very good at telling us what books have sold and what books need to be reordered, it won't tally up things by type of sale (phone vs. web vs. mail-order). The bookstore report should include more information on actual web sales.
Anecdotally it appears as if about half our web orders are new customers. Many of them are from geographic areas which are not traditionally Quaker. A&O has produced a flyer which goes into orders for new customers.
After
we saw how successful the "googlization" of Quakerbooks was, I thought
we should try it for Quakerfinder. It took a little seasoning to get
everyone on A&O to sign off on the
project but I am delighted to say they saw their way clear. The result
has been nothing sort of amazing. Use of the site has grown by 340%.
But the actual numbers are even more important: by my best estimate,
over 6000 a month are using Quakerfinder who would not have even found
the resource if we hadn't made it search engine friendly. That's 72,000
people a year--twice FGC's membership, and these are the EXTRA people
coming. Altogether at our current rate, this site is being used by over
100,000 unique visitors. Even if only one in ten of them make it to a
Meeting, that's a lot of people.
In last year's report I pointed out that most of Quakerfinder's traffic was coming from the FGC site. At that point, it didn't looking like giving the location look-up utility it's own domain name was paying off in any tangible way. Now it's clearly worth it. Just the extra 600 or so visitors Quakerfinder is throwing to FGCQUaker.org site makes it worth it! Horray!
Twenty Times the Google-Linked Visits:
I compared two typical months, one before and the other after the
"search engine optimization." In May 2004 Quakerfinder received 241
visitors from Google searches (footnote 1). In September, it received
3813 visitors--that's over twenty times the visits. Overall visits
almost tripled, from 2292 to 6037, with 60% of those extra visitors
directly attributed to the Google bounce. The chart to the left shows
daily Google-referred visits since the middle of March.
More Than Just Google: Other search engines were affected too: all together search engine visits went from from 311 in May to 4134 in September. For those interested, the top five search engines for Quakerfinder traffic are:
As you can see, Google far overwhelms everyone else, which is why we often just call this "the googlization" of Quakerfinder!
Mailing Lists
Late in the fiscal year, we purchased bulk email software. No, we're not going to try to sell Viagra or a new home mortgage. This program will help us get information out to our bookstore customers and committee lists. Our occasional bookstore emails ("Book Musings from Lucy") have been very well received, with only a tiny fraction of recipients asking to be taken off the list.
Web Host Changes
A big project, though not very exciting, is that we're changing our web hosting company. FGCQuaker.org is with the new company (OLM)and Quakerfinder.org and Quakerbooks.org will be moving shortly. The new company organizes our accounts better and we hope that their service is better. (We'd recommend avoiding Data Realm also known as Serve.com.)
Programs I Use to Collect Stats:
Measuring Links:
I use Altavista's search engine to measure how many links a site has. For good reasons, Google doesn't list obscure websites and also counts how a site's links back to itself. Here's a sample Altavista query:
See How Can We Measure the State of the Peace Movement? for more on this method of measurement.
Unique Visitors:
The most standard measure of website usage, here is a definition: "A real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor (because the page accesses are all associated with the same IP address) but twenty page accesses."
Hammonton NJ 08037
martink@martinkelley.com
