Vol. 29 No.1, September 2001

Notes from the Web

Starting with May 2001, I am collecting monthly statistics on the Southern California Chapter website usage, using the Webtrends software package on the main SLA website. The initial two months of statistics are interesting to me (the webmaster), and I thought you might be interested as well.

The statistics look very good overall. We have a lot more traffic than I expected! For example, in June we had 1,344 visits to our website, with a total of 832 unique visitors. The Employment section page lead with 840 visits. The home page was second with 400 visits. Other major sections of the website were visited between 19 - 47 times each. Not bad!

Based on the limited data we have at this time, I plan on re-designing the employment page. If we can direct traffic from this popular page to other parts of the site, it will be to our advantage. I would also recommend that we add links for non-members who are visiting our employment page: we could inform them about our chapter, and tell them what the chapter can do for them? I think this could become a useful recruitment tool for us. By the way, Richard Lindstrom is the new Employment Advisory Council Member. He has already started updating the Employment section of the website, and he is doing a great job.

In the next newsletter, I will review some of the other SLA Chapter websites, and discuss some of the features that are successful for the more heavily trafficked sites. Teaser: the Southern California site is the fifth most visited chapter website out of 37 sites on the SLA server.

Robert Powers

Jet Propulsion Laboratory