Monthly Web Round-up : July

Despite the surprisingly sunny weather July was another good month for wiredsussex.com with the site again attracting over 40,000 visits with well over 17,000 unique visitors. This month I’ll look into some of the stats around those visitors and will also focus on the Project Board.

As usual we'll start with a few headline figures for the month:

• Jobs Posted: 57
• Projects Posted: 34
• Workspace Adverts Posted: 16
• New Members: 47

The operating systems visitors used in July were fairly similar to those used in previous months. The main difference, as predicted, was a big rise in iPad visitors as 88 people used their shiny new toys to check out the Wired Sussex site. The browser stats remained fairly consistent with last month.

Twitter remained our top referrer for the third month in a row and there was an increase in visits from mail clients (hotmail, yahoo etc) due to more email marketing from us during the last month.

July also saw a record amount of Projects posted on our Projects Board. The board has seen a steady increase in postings and visits since it was introduced to the site in February 2008. The Board started off with 10 project postings in its first month on the site. The number then remained between 12 and six postings until December when, like most activity to our site, the number dropped. There was a slight overall improvement to the number of postings through the year before we got over 15 postings for the first time in November 2009. After another dip for December the Projects have really been rolling in this year with at least 15 every month until our record breaking 34 projects posted last month.

It’s very encouraging to see this service finally start to really take-off. I remember the Jobs board starting slowly (even though posting was free!) with postings barely making it to double figures for the month. It took nearly four years to get a month with over 20 jobs posted but now we regularly get well in excess of 50 vacancies added.

I think the learning from this is that a lot of the success of the site is based on our reputation in the ‘offline’ world. We can (and have) made improvements to the Projects Board itself but a lot of its success is based on its reputation and word of mouth. The majority of our posters are not Wired Sussex members; they’re local businesses looking for digital media services. Anecdotally I’ve heard a lot of posters have recommended the service to other local companies and if this trend continues, and people continue to get a good response to their adverts, then we should see the amount of postings continue to increase and this should help bring some brilliant Projects to our members.

...and finally I’ll finish as always with a few of the strange search terms that bought people to the website in July. Last month people thought we’d be able to help them with: “Hot Custard”, “Benefit fraud” and “Mr Moon Playhouse”. If you’re looking for custard then you might want to stick with Delia online but if you’re looking for the latest digital media projects then you should be checking out the Wired Sussex Project Board.

Luke