Submitted by Sammy Smith (sammy@thesga.org)

Good news! The SGA website’s numbers are up!

We are adding new stories at a good clip—we added twenty in October! That is approximately one per business day!

This graph shows the number of stories we’ve added each month since the revamped website debuted in March 2009. We now have more than 700 stories on the website (including about 150 glossary entries).

We’re also seeing a continuing rise in viewership. Our 2010 September and October pageviews average 380 and 385 per day. Yes, that’s per day! Your SGA website is popular!

Pageviews occur whenever anyone looks at any kind of webpage offered on the SGA’s website. This includes the home page, any story, any set of tagged stories, etc. Thus, a pageview may include one story or many. The number of pageviews per day, shown on this graph, is an indication of the intensity of usage our website receives.

Note that the months with the lowest per day pageviews have been in the summer. This suggests that we’re getting many pageviews that are linked to the annual educational cycle.

Pageviews, however, are not the same as people.

Here’s a monthly count of unique visitors. Unique visitors aren’t quite the same as people, either, because the term refers to places people visit the website from, in Internet terms. So, if you have two computers at your house, they count as one “unique visitor.” Just think how many different human beings are collapsed together as a single unique visitor in a large office!

Note that we had nearly five thousand unique visitors in October 2010!

Now let’s zero in on the last two months—that is, September and October of 2010.

The SGA had several big events in October, including of course the Fall Meeting at St. Simons Island, and ArchaeoBus activities. In October, the ArchaeoBus attended two well-advertised events, the Georgia National Fair (attendance exceeded 465,000) and the two-day Georgia Conference on the Social Studies in Athens.

Prior to these events, our members and guests received planning information from our website, including in September, especially in advance of the Fall Meeting.

In short, several factors have contributed to the rising average daily pageview counts this autumn.

The 11-day Georgia National Fair began on October 7th, and this graph shows average daily pageviews before the Fair, during the Fair, from when the Fair began through the end of October, and, finally, the average for both months.

Website pageviews showed a distinct “bump” during the Fair, but can we assume this just has to do with Fair visitors? Hard to say…many people were also checking the website during this same period to get information about the Fall Meeting, which was the same time as the last weekend of the Fair.

This graph shows an interesting pattern…these pageview averages are by day of the week, for September and October only. Note that the lowest average daily pageviews are on Saturdays, and the highest are, by a long shot, on Mondays. Offer your theory for our average daily pageview pattern by weekday by commenting below….

Okay, here’s one more (possibly) interesting graphic…. Of the many pages on the SGA website, which are the most popular? The most frequently visited page on our website is, tada!, the homepage—which really should be no surprise.

Each month next most popular pageviews vary, and here you can see how diverse the viewing has become. Certainly, there’s been some dilution because we now have so many stories, or options for pages to visit.

Note that in the first spring after the website redesign, the homepage received considerable attention. Now, people are visiting many other pages, too. Probably, links distributed via email, Googling for specific information, etc., are among the reasons the percentage of homepage visits have decreased.

And now, SGA members—you can contribute to these numbers! Get your contribution to the website ready now! Email Editor Kelly Woodard by clicking here with a story about attending the Fall Meeting, an activity your Chapter is sponsoring, or another story you think may be of interest to SGA members!

Posted online on Monday, November 1st, 2010