Some annual web statistics and two project updates
By Ed Mitchell 15th October 2012
Here are some interesting web statistics and a few stories of things the web project has been focusing on this last year which I thought you might enjoy.
- Web statistics
- Update on the Social Reporters project
- Update on the Project Sharing Engine project
1 Website statistics
Site visits:
- 290,190 people visited the site (unique visits) between 1/10/11 and 30/09/12
- 1,386,763 pages were viewed on the site between 1/10/11 and 30/09/12
- Average visit duration: 3.05 minutes
- Average time spent on a page: 1:33 minutes
Top pages:
- Homepage
- Support – what is a Transition Initiative?
- Transition nearby search
- Initiatives map
- Ingredients section: Starting
- About Transition Network
- News
- Initiatives index page
- Community index page
- Stories (social reporters homepage)
Users:
- 13,000 registered users in total
- 7,214 registered users have completed a personal profile page
- 2,255 of registered users have identified themselves as facilitators around the world
- 1,898 of registered users have identified themselves as speakers around the world
Projects:
- 280 in total
- 140 of which have updated their project profiles since 1/10/11
Transition Initiatives:
- 1,043 in total
- 186 of which have registered since 1/10/11
Spam:
- 34,851 spam attacks have been repelled since the site launch in 2010
2. Sharing stories of Transition
“Fantastic post, Teen! Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry! Wish you could have brought Danny in…”
The Transition Social Reporters project was one year old on September 18th, 2012. Since then it has produced nearly 350 individual articles on a huge range of weekly topics ranging from Flying to skill-sharing, supermarkets, new business models to how they think Transition Network is doing. This is a true grassroots representation of Transition on the ground.
“Thanks for this – a lovely irony that a true denizen of cardboard city should cause us to question our own little cardboard future. Shakespeare would be proud of you…”
The dozen or so writers are entirely voluntary, set their own editorial agenda, manage their own time, reach decisions as a group over email, and produce fantastic insights into how it is to be in Transition around The UK, and increasingly around the world.
Some of the social reporters at the Transition Network conference 2012
Transition Network provides and manages their web technical platform and email lists, but does not interfere in any editorial decisions or exert any other form of authority beyond support.
We are constantly amazed and inspired by the stories from this group who provide an invaluable human level insight into the experience of ‘being in Transition’.
3. Knowledge sharing
We have been supporting and encouraging the growth of our original projects directory and are proud to have 280 projects added entirely voluntarily. We will be enhancing the projects directory in November in order to make it easier to add and search for project information. We feature a ‘featured’ project on the homepage and will be co-ordinating a ‘projects push’ focus in the coming months.
Our main focus in this area has been the innovative ‘Project Sharing Engine’ project. This aims to distribute the projects information away from the Transition Network site and represent it on Transition Initiatives’ own websites via an easy to use ‘widget’. This will spread the projects’ information wider than our site, and support Transition Initiatives’ sites by offering them more information and interactivity, showing them as part of a growing and positive movement.
Screengrab of Project Sharing Engine ‘widget installation’ screen for webmasters
Despite being easy to use and simple to look at, it is a complicated product and we have been working very hard behind the scenes to get it working as a sustainable product in the long term.
We will release the alpha version of the widget in October 2012 for testing by an ‘alpha’ group of Transition Initiative webmasters. Then we will do changes to it in line with their feedback with a view to releasing the ‘beta’ version to a wider group of webmasters in 2013, before a final launch in Spring 2013.
Screengrab of ‘project addition’ widget which will appear on TIs’ own sites
We don’t know what will happen, or what the effect of the widget will be; we are genuinely in unknown territory.
We hope that it will accelerate and widen the addition of projects to the directory (Transition and not Transition projects), but can’t make estimates of numbers.
As far as we know, no other organisation has tried to distribute their information or challenge the traditionally centralised power of a organisational website in this way.
As well as the technical side of the PSE project, this is about how to build a group of Transition webmasters through this project, and what is the best way for TI webmasters to support eachother across the web and build self-managed networks.