Editorial comments for 2010
[ Return to 2011 ]
December 17th, 2010
Motueka Online received reassuring endorsement this week when the Community Board approved my request for the $180 that it costs each year to physically keep the website going (domain name and server fees). Either the board members were trying to butter me up to write nice things about them, or they were genuinely grateful for the website as now established community asset which is helping the board communicate its messages and is creating links within our community.
And a useful community asset it is becoming, as exemplified by the part it played in our "Best Town" victory. Along with the dedicated work of Keep Motueka Beautiful to present the case and get us through to the final, plus many individuals urging others to vote, the website provided a direct link to the voting website and kept us up to date throughout.
After the win (which we were able to display first thing - leading to a large number of page hits that day), the website was contacted by the TV3 crew as they were driving to Motueka to ask for contact names and best places to film. They had seen our coverage through Google and thought it was the best place to start getting material for their show.
Perhaps it's this win or perhaps it's more tourists researching a visit here, but Motueka Online's visitor numbers have jumped about 15% over the past couple of weeks, now heading for about 7000 visitors for the month and over 40,000 page views!
Finally, I'm not sure how the website will run over the holiday period. I will be around and updating it when necessary, and will be happy to publish material sent in by residents, including photos, continuously. However, the events calendar is already looking thin for the next six weeks as fewer organised events are held and clubs and groups go into recess. So we may have periods where nothing much new is on the site. We'll play it by ear.
November 18th
Our visitor numbers for the past month has now topped an average of 200 per day. This is now approaching the average number of visitors that the Recreation Centre gets each day - an interesting statistic! I hope that the website is providing even a fraction of the community benefit that the wonderful Rec Centre does.
A couple of highlights for the month:
1. A film company wanted extras for a movie they were making at Kaiteriteri, and thanks to an article on this website (here) they got more applicants than needed. Due to time constraints, they placed no other adverts, so all the action centred here.
2. Quite a lively debate arose via this site (here) over the role of TDC Motueka Ward councillors as appointed members of the Community Board. Democratic expression of ideas is alive and well among sections of Motueka!
And this encouraging comment from one of the site's users: "Congratulations on the wonderful job you are doing. It's sad to think of the amounts the TDC squandered on the "ground up" upgrade of their website, without really providing a more useful product, when you are providing such a terrific community service on your own back."
I'm always trying to get more community voices involved in the site. Some people and groups are taking valuable advantage of what the site can provide; there are some of them, and you may be inspired to follow suite:
- The Arts Group and Camera Club regularly send photos of their members' best works for display on their pages.
- The Uniting Church and St Peter Chanel Church post their weekly notices and newsletters, and the former even posts the text of most of its Sunday sermons.
- The Recreation Centre has a downloadable & printable version of its current term programme, as do the Arts Group, 50+ Walking Group and U3A.
- The Community Garden project is running a forum for interested people to see how development is progressing.
- Keep Motueka Beautiful and the Community Whanau both post the minutes of their monthly meetings, and the Historical Association writes reports of talks presented after each monthly meeting.
October 15th
The full September activity of Motueka Online resulted in yet another big rise in site visitor numbers. Earlier this year the server visitor statistics were being muddied by some unusual activities based in distant countries such as Romania at odd hours such as 3am. These were probably spammers trying to use the site to send their advertisements (to me, not you). However, this seems to have finally settled down, meaning the statistics now are probably fairly accurate.
So what are we seeing? Last month there were about 5,600 visits to the site, made by 2036 individual (unique) people (many of whom visit several times in a month). That "unique visitor" number is about 20% of the local population, which I think is quite pleasing. What's more, whereas it's common with many websites for visitors mainly to view home pages and then leave, for Motueka Online the average number of pages viewed by all visitors is 5.3 pages (or a total of over 30,000 pages viewed for the month). This means that most visitors actually look at quite a bit of the site while they're visiting. Think of it as like a shopping mall - we're getting more people coming in and each person is browsing quite a few shops rather than just walking the main corridor.
Which pages (apart from the home page) are getting the most visitors? Here is the numerical order, starting with the most visited: Photo gallery (we all know web users love photos), News, Youth forum, Events calendar, Community Board, Our people, Noticeboard, Website policies, Community groups, Discussion forum, Community garden, Sports, About Motueka, Our sponsors, Blogsites, Our history, Video gallery, and Churches.
Of the pages which are currently newsworthy, the three popular ones this month have been the Camera Club (with its photo exhibition and its "Honours" photos), the new Community Garden pages, and the local body election results.
Speaking of which, I've taken great journalistic pleasure out of being first to publish the election results last Saturday. I was at my computer tidying up some emails when the TDC announcement arrived so within 5 minutes it was online. And plenty of people found it first here, with 72 people viewing the document that day. Some of those people found the results via Google rather than looking directly - the phrase "motueka election results" figured strongly in Google search terms that weekend and they all pointed first to Motueka Online. To me this is reassuring, that Google is in fact checking the contents of this website at least daily and keeping us up near the top of all local searches.
Regarding the Community Garden pages, already it's clear that these will one day constitute a comprehensive history of the venture, viewable across the community and to interested outsiders. It's associated discussion forum shows the early decision making in its gory detail, which one day will fascinate local historians. With the same thing happening with this year's Festival of Lights, we can see that in time Motueka Online may become a broad resource for community historians.
September 20th
This month brings to an end the first half year of operation of this website, and we can start to see some interesting trends. The most important (from our point of view) is the continuing rise of the number of visitors to the site and the number of pages they are viewing. Back in the first month of the site (April) there were 2647 visitors over the 30 days, who viewed a total of 18,829 pages. Four months later, in August, there were 5022 visitors viewing 33,297 pages.
Also there are now 627 pages making up the site, providing information on an ever increasing range of activities and topics. We must thank our sponsors for their continued financial support to enable this work to grow. Speaking of sponsors, welcome (starting from October 1st) to Countdown, which has taken over the sponsorship commitment previously made by Fresh Choice.
We like the outside world to know that we're proud of the site, which is now by a country mile the largest community website in New Zealand. One nice touch for us happened on the Tuesday after the "Welcome to the Godwits" weekend this month, when the speaker at that godwits event was interviewed on National Radio. He recommended listeners go to Motueka Online to view the photos we published. The visitor statistics showed that approaching 100 people looked at that page on that day.
Some interesting discussion forum threads have been running in recent weeks, particularly on three topics: TDC's draft rules banning religious and political groups using the Museum frontage (very strong responses to date), the upcoming local body elections (more opinions would be good), and the referendum on the Nelson/Tasman amalgamation. This website is a good, safe platform for expressing opinions on issues, and we hope this facility is used ever more into the future.
August 13th
July was another good month of growth of the website, with visitor numbers and pages viewed up nearly 20%. Soon we will hit the first target of 5000 visits in one month and 35,000 pages viewed. The site itself is getting ever larger - now over 560 pages in total.
So what pages are most people looking at? Well, the home page is clearly the most visited, with 1908 page views in July. Next is the Youth Forum with 656 page views [intriguing because there are not many active topics there], followed by the Community Board (359), the Discussion Forum (301), Photo Gallery (253), the Events Calendar (238), Latest News (193), People Profiles (151), Blogsites (151), the Noticeboard (149), Community Groups (130), Churches (126), Video Gallery (124) and Sports Clubs (116).
VOLUNTEER EXCHANGE
Of interest will be how well used the new Volunteer Exchange area will be. Surely this is one great use of such an active community website, and a forerunner of some other types of community cooperation and give-and-take facilities. So far two organisations have advertised and one person has volunteered her services.
COMMUNITY BOARD PROJECTS
Another part of the site which I'm very proud of is the Community Board Current Projects page, which is now pretty much filled out with all significant activities that the board is currently involved with. This area of the site was developed after I found it so hard to work back through many months of board agendas, minutes and reports to trace histories, backgrounds and current work on these projects, but now they are a (hopefully continually updated) huge resource for any interested ratepayers and residents to know the current status of work under way.
NEWSPAPER DIGESTS
One other new feature added since my last report has been a weekly summary of what's in the two Motueka weekly newspapers. Locals may find this a little redundant, but I'm hearing from an increasing number of Motuekan people who are out of town at present - expats overseas or in the cities - who would like to know what the papers are saying.
July 11th
It's been an interesting month here at the editorial desk, much of it around the Festival of Lights celebration. Thanks to the contributions of several people, particularly with photos, we ended up with a great historic resource - a large web page with reports of most Festival events and over 100 photos. Newspaper reports and photos are already fish-n-chips wrappers but this page will be around for a long time yet. And thanks to the Festival committee's use of this website to advertise event changes. The result was a large readership (shown by the server visitor statistics) throughout the week of the programme and reports pages.
Site visitor numbers were up by just on 10% for the month over May, and page-view numbers up by 15%, indicating that the visitors are on average looking at more pages per visit than before. The subscription service (where people supplying their email addresses are sent a list of all site changes during the past week) is slowly being adopted, with 15 people being served.
On the "Motueka on High" market day on June 18th, Motueka Online had a stall in front of the Guardian building, and we talked with a number of people who stopped to find out more about the website. One interesting meeting was with the man who owns the domain name 'www.motueka.info', which he bought years ago but has made no website related to it. He said he was so impressed with this website that he arranged for his domain name to redirect to ours. Meaning if you type www.motueka.info into your browser you will arrive here. A great endorsement, thanks Les.
David Armstrong
Editor / Administrator
June 11th, 2010
This is the first of what I hope will be a regular (perhaps monthly) casual commentary on the website, the feedback it's getting, how busy it's been, its successes, and where appropriate any amusing anecdotes.
VISITOR NUMBERS
The site has been operating for almost 4 months now, although officially only since March 29th. As expected, the publicity it received around the launch date brought lots of "visitors" who had not been aware of it in its early weeks, so the visitor statistics (as provided by the site's server) have risen sharply.
But I'm not getting too excited about the exact numbers - any website visitor statistics should only be taken as a rough guide to how busy and popular the site is. Some people pop in and out several times in a session, each of which counts as a single visit, while others roam around from page to page clocking up views of scores of individual pages while still only counting as one visit.
With that in mind, here are the aggregated visitor counts and number of pages viewed for the past three months:
March: Visitors = 1415; Pages viewed = 11,245.
April: Visitors = 2647; Pages viewed = 18,829.
May: Visitors = 3303; Pages viewed = 21,537.
Already June's figures are suggesting higher counts again this month.
FEEDBACK
It has been nice to receive a steady trickle of positive emails praising the effort and results so far. Most are from Motuekans who have discovered the site, sent in a contribution (usually an event notice) and added a word of praise. A few lovely ones have come from afar, and here are some (names omitted):
"I met Grant Douglas [our gardening diarist] at a community garden workshop in Lyttelton. He raved about your site and so I had a wee peek tonight. What a fantastic site. So current and a wealth of information for your locals. Well done. Looks great. Keep up the good work."
"To the website editor, This would have to be the best site. Congradulations. I have only just been directed to the site. Now I can visit "home" by sitting at the computer.Thank you." (from an Australian location)
"I work at the Association of Neighbourhood Houses of BC in Canada and am interested in finding out some information about your organization. I have looked at your site and see the Community Board and am wondering if you also have an Executive Director of the organization. If so, can you please send me contact information for that individual or who I should get in touch with if I would like to find out more about your organization? I also wanted to find out more about Neighbourhood Centre and community development organizations in New Zealand."
ENCOURAGING STEPS
As well as the photographers who have been sending in their snaps to our Photo Gallery page, several groups are seeing the benefits of placing material on this site. The Art Group and the Camera Club are using it to allow their members to display their works to a far wider audience. U3A and the Historical Association keep theis pages updated with their meeting reports and programmes, while Keep Motueka Beautiful and the Community Whanau publish their meeting minutes on the site.
I was thrilled that the Festival of Lights team have decided to use Motueka Online to provide information on the event. Not only have they published their events calendar on their page, but they have also placed on their print advertising the fact the advice to "Check www.MotuekaOnline.org.nz for programme alterations and cancellations". They clearly understand the use of online media to provide up-to-date information in a way that print media cannot.
SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
One of the better additions this past month has been the subscription service, whereby if you provide your email address I'll email you every weekend a summary of all significant additions to the site over the past week. So far eleven people have subscribed, but I hope the number will grow steadily as the site gets more regularly used.
David Armstrong
Editor / Administrator
Previous editorial comment:
For other website articles written as editorial matter on the site's development, click these links:
• Report of the website's launch
• Early "political" problems
