PROBE Web Site Report

One brief caveat... the numbers given are on the low side, as we continue to have some problems with the trackers on the pages. Just as an example... the "Front page" tracker shows an additional 26 hits since this time a couple days ago, while the "all pages" tracker shows only one. (sigh...) At any rate...

After approximately 18 months of operation, the PROBE site continues to attract more viewers than we ever imagined when we put it up. An average of seven people a day connect to the front page of the site, while 16 per day connect to at least one of the pages. On the highest single day, following an announcement of some major additions, 93 people came to take a look.

Over the full time period of its existence, an average of 439 people per month hit one of the pages, with the high month showing 823 visits. (The numbers for the front page are 51/week and 418/month.) Total visits show 11,553 to the front page since September 1998, and 15,190 to all pages since January 1999.

A brief look at the numbers reveals additional surprises:

• Approximately 25 percent of the visits are to the "Aids for BEs" page. This is a surprisingly low percentage. We know that editors are using the articles posted for their bulletins, but people are apparently also finding the other types of information (e.g., bulletins online, contest information) useful and going directly to those pages too.
• We have had 1,612 visits through 134 Web site referrers. Approximately 38 percent of the people who find us this way are referred from the link on the Society's page, around 20 percent are from Tim Cheney's page and/or the announcements on the Harmonet, and the remainder from Tom Arneberg's FAQs pages and others who have linked our site from their pages.

In addition to general updating and reorganization of the pages, there have been three significant additions to the site in the past year.

• An expanded "About PROBE" section, including Hall of Honor inductees.
• The revised version of the PROBE Style Manual
• The long awaited clip art section. Only about a dozen pieces so far, but they are being used in chapter bulletins.

While we have added a few PR articles, this remains the biggest gap in our "coverage." I would love to be able to add a complete new category "Aids for PR" to parallel the "Aids for BEs," but don't have nearly enough material to make that section work.

There is one additional recurring problem, that of the stability of the harmonize.com site. Even as I write this piece, I am unable to access the Web site because harmonize.com is down. If this continues to be a problem, we may want to consider moving away from our free host, as wonderful as that is, and paying for a more stable environment.