club websites - how busy ?

[pHz]

im sure there must have been other threads on this but a current picture would be more interesting

if you are involved with the maintenance of your clubs site or know this info through another source id be interested to know how many visitors (not hits) your club site gets on an average day ?

to start the ball rolling - we have around 90 members (maybe 40 regularly shooting) and get between 20 and 30 visitors a day on average

slainte rob

[Watch_Man]

Rob

we average about 160 unique visitors per day with about 30% currently coming from the USA (the word Boston features a lot ) on a busy day just before or after a competition this can rise to over 600.

Interestingly for us most of the visitors enter the site via the clubnews page and not via the main index

[pHz]

thanks trevor - i reckon we have some work to yet then (although those current figures are already higher than the period before i took over our website)

slainte rob

[englishwarbow]

For a club website thats not bad especially when it's going up! The way to get people coming back is new content, forums are an excellent way to do this although, as the moderators here will tell you, even the most well behaved forum needs monotoring. Something I find which works well is plenty of photos and above all video, it doesn't have to be superb (youtube is a testament to that) but feature characters as much as you can and host your video on youtube thereby extending your reach and saving valuable server space!

[cestria]

Our site has been up since last October and has averaged 120 unique visitors/month.
It is quite interesting to see the stats, like Watch Man we get a fair amount of traffic from the USA

[Watch_Man]

Originally Posted by pHz

thanks trevor - i reckon we have some work to yet then (although those current figures are already higher than the period before i took over our website)

slainte rob

Rob, I have to agree with the point made by englishwarbow in the key to getting more hits is to keep content up to date. Also make sure you put links on AIUK to results, target lists etc hosted on your site. This helps with your google ranking as they actually see external links coming into your site.

As mentioned, the word 'Boston' drives traffic in from the USA and it has taken about 9 months to get this down from the majority of traffic. I had to change some of the wording as we were getting stupid numbers of visitors from the USA eating up our bandwidth. So while it was a good ego massage it wasn't really doing anything for the site.

We also make sure there is an internal path from the index page to the club news page which allows me to update the site with a headline on the front and the main story inside. Now most of our regulars just go straight to club news.

If you look at Friskney Bowmen - Club News you will see we had 9 stories and announcements in February, some are just one liners but these are important to google as its robot is looking for content changes to improve ranking.

[Hidden Hippo]

Nice site Watch_Man. I like the fact that you've actually got some contact numbers in an obvious place and its easy to navigate. I know that when I came to uni finding a contact number on our website was quite tricky (not impossible, it just took some doing).

[Rhys]

Our site has been much less in use since we started up a facebook group and a forum.

However I've got a new design on the way:

Not-Archers

(still in progress, based on the website i did for my astronomy group STAGES Homepage)

Maybe with a better layout it'll be used more again

[Watch_Man]

Originally Posted by Hidden Hippo

Nice site Watch_Man. I like the fact that you've actually got some contact numbers in an obvious place and its easy to navigate. I know that when I came to uni finding a contact number on our website was quite tricky (not impossible, it just took some doing).

Thanks Its driven by a Dreamweaver template and the side bar carries through every page so if a number or contact changes we only need to change it on the template page to update the site.

[Watch_Man]

Originally Posted by Rhys

Not-Archers

(still in progress, based on the website i did for my astronomy group STAGES Homepage)

Maybe with a better layout it'll be used more again

Nice rollovers on the top bar. I think it would work well if you can get the content in and as Hidden Hippo says - make sure the contact information is on the front page, there is plenty of room down the left.