by John Callaway
It was 4 years ago this month that I launched the Greater Louisville Bonsai Society website. Not much has changed since, except for the addition of content. As of February 2008, we had more than 260 articles and 13 photo galleries, which totaled more than 300 images. The site has had well over 200,000 hits, and, in the last few months has been averaging over 3000 page hits with 391 unique visitors. The website visitors are comprised of people from all over the world with the United States, Australia, and Canada representing the top visitors.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve spent a lot of time maintaining the website, but not a lot of time improving the site. A large assortment of tools are now available that were not yet conceived of when the site was first launched. After 4 years, I decided it was about time to overhaul the site. The layout hasn’t changed very much so that we keep a consistent feel that our visitors are comfortable with. The big change is the code and technologies used behind the scenes. An improved database and new internet programming language has been utilized to improve speed and loading of the individual pages.
Unique page names for each individual article are now being displayed, which improves search engine listings. This will also help our users when using the improved site searching which is now available with the latest changes.
A new syndication format has been implemented to increase reader subscriptions. Also, links have been provided for each article to be saved to del.icio.us, digg, StumbleUpon, and reddit. This will help increase internet awareness for the Greater Louisville Bonsai Society and the bonsai community as a whole. Comments can now be left in response to articles. Dialog can be opened and maintained with a more broad bonsai community.
How does this affect me, you ask? Well, I have donated my time to the club to improve the website so there is no additional cost. With increase visibility the GLBS reaches a broader audience. Once individuals see what the club contributes to the community in the way of meetings, events, articles, etc., then we can increase our membership numbers as those individuals get more involved. If you haven’t been to the website lately, logon, post a comment, and subscribe to the feed, save an article to del.icio.us. It’s all free and it helps promote the club.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/louisvillebonsai/~3/262308455/post.aspx
No comments:
Post a Comment