SawyersCreek.org Website Report for December 2004

2005.01.02

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SawyersCreek.org went online on 2 December 2004. Storage space and monthly bandwidth usage for December 2004 are less than 1% of their respective limits. There were about 17 regular visitors to the site in December, and they seem to be very computer-literate. More online content is desired - ideally generated for us, by us.

Mark Bersalona
Webmaster, SawyersCreek.org

DISCUSSION

SawyersCreek.org now online

Kristine Robinson and I established the domain name SawyersCreek.org and a web host account on 1 December 2004; both are officially under her name, and we both have username/password access to the domain and web host accounts. The domain name was registered through GoDaddy.com for $8.95/year. The web host account was through eMax Hosting (www.emaxhosting.com) - their Budget hosting plan for $5.95/month includes 500 MB storage and 40 GB/month bandwidth and should be more than sufficient to start.

After discussing planned content and design for the website with Kristine, I made changes to the prototype web pages and posted the pages to the host on 2 December 2004. With additional tweaks the site has taken its present form.

I have created SawyersCreek.org Email accounts for the board officers and for the webmaster.

The theme of SawyersCreek.org is an online version of "The Creek" newsletter; indeed some of the first articles are taken from the first newsletter. The design is simple but efficient:

• the pages use static HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for content and layout, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for presentation and typography
• the format complies with XHTML 1.0 Transitional standards
• new articles can be added by making a copy of a single template file, modifying it and adding appropriate links to the main pages
• site navigation simulates a tabbed interface
• presentation degrades minimally with older "non-compliant" web browsers like Netscape 4.x

The pages were developed with an HTML editor instead of a WYSIWYG web page tool like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. Consequently, future additions to the site will not require the more complicated and expensive WYSIWYG tools; indeed Notepad or any other text editor would suffice if the webmaster is careful with the HTML code. Knowledge of HTML and CSS would be required, but that would be expected of the webmaster in any case.

The SawyersCreek.org site needs additional content, particularly the Committees and Kids sections. It is hoped that Sawyer's Creek residents will eventually submit content such as recipes, classified ads, school honor roll names, and life events such as birthdays, graduations, weddings, etc. Posting generic content ("outsourced" content?) has been discussed; locally- and self-generated content will have priority.

Bandwidth/disk space usage

• Total disk space usage = 3.78 MB
• versus allocation of 500 MB = 0.76% of limit

• Total bandwith for December 2004 = 23.96 MB
• versus monthly bandwidth allocation of 40 GB = 0.06% of limit

Hourly bandwidth (KB)

Heaviest usage is between 7-9 A.M. (visitors checking weather conditions and forecasts, or AvantGo.com monitoring the site?), at 11 A.M. and late at night between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M.

Daily bandwidth (KB)

The spike in bandwidth occurs with the first articles including digital photos.

Favorites list vs. unique addresses

An estimated 17 users added SawyersCreek.org to their browser's Favorites list. Visitors from 123 unique IP addresses visited SawyersCreek.org. Since most ISPs assign available IP addresses to users as they connect to the Internet, I believe the number of people actively visiting SawyersCreek.org is closer to 17 than 123.

Countries

Out of 23.96 MB total bandwidth for December 2004, 23.82 MB (99.42%) were from IP addresses in the USA. Additional visits were from Sweden and China, which I assume are due to search robots or spyware originating or bouncing from servers in those countries.

Top 10 pages, based on views

1. Home
2. Neighborhood
3. Archives
4. Contacts
5. Committees
6. Kids
7. Article 2004.11.17 - "Memo from the Board..."
8. Article 2004.11.20 - "The Creek Contest"
9. Article 2004.11.15 - "Gardener's Corner"
10. Error 404 - File Not Found

Operating systems and browsers

The operating systems of visitors to SawyersCreek.org are ranked based on hits.

1. Windows, 53.7%
2. FreeBSD, 41%
3. Unknown, 3%
4. Linux, 2%

The "visitor" using FreeBSD is AvantGo.com. I have a copy of the SawyersCreek.org site on my PDA (personal digital assistant) via AvantGo.com. AvantGo.com monitors the site at least daily; that it accounts for 41% of the hits on the site suggests that human visitors to SawyersCreek.org tend to look for new content instead of rereading every article in the archive - which is what one would expect!

The browsers of visitors to SawyersCreek.org are ranked based on hits.

1. Mozilla, 43.7%
2. MS Internet Explorer, 28.6%
3. Firefox, 24.1%
4. Konqueror, 1.3%
5. Netscape, 1%
6. Unknown, 0.7%
7. Opera, 0.2%

The visitors to SawyersCreek.org during the site's first month seem to be very computer-saavy and have switched from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Over 90% of the general public use Microsoft's browser, often due to organizational inertia or ignorance of alternatives.