Report on September Activity

September was far from being a typical month as it started with the introduction of this new blog and ended with my taking a holiday which meant less online activity in the latter part of the month. However the new blog has proved its value for the following reasons:

• The new blog provides an interesting new front end to the web site, making it easier for regulars to get automatic notifications of each update, directly accessing www.hertfordshire-genealogy.blogspot.com. and has already attracted some new visitors via google.
• The blog software automatically highlights the most popular items - meaning that first time visitors can quickly find the postings that others have found popular.
• The format is more appropriate to more ephemeral posts - such as news of coming events, items published in newsletters, magazines and on other web sites of interest to Hertfordshire researchers.
• It makes it easier to provide larger images on the main web site if required. See High Resolution Images of Old Hertfordshire Post Cards
• The statistics provides me with rapid feedback as to what is currently interesting readers of the blog and plan further updates of the blog and main web site accordingly.

So what happened in the first month. The new blog was only fully accessible from about September 8 and there were 868 "page views" during the month - suggesting well over 1000 in a full month. It would seem that visiting the site counts as one page view (however many posts there are on the opening page) and each additional post selected from the menu counts as another page view. This compares with 485 visits to the old blog in August. The most popular post was Buying Hertfordshire Wills Online

There is a world-wide distribution map and table available which show that in September the number of page views  were; UK 517, Australia 84, USA 79, Canada 59. Spain 50, Denmark 28, Russia 16, Finland 2, South Africa 2. It only shows the top of the list but I know that there have also been visits from Austria and India during the month.

The main web site had 19520 visitors of which 5499 were repeat visits during the month. and there was a total of 47460 page views.Only 480 visits were made to the Guide to Old Hertfordshire. However there were 429 referrals from 114 different pages on Wikipedia, which can be considered very satisfactory.