At some point later today (Friday), PARWICH.ORG will be clocking up its 10,000th page view. Considering that we launched the site less than four weeks ago, that’s a remarkable achievement, and one which surpasses even our wildest expectations.
If you had asked me to estimate our daily readership figures a couple of months ago, I would have guessed at a figure of between 80 and 100 page views per day, if we were lucky. In reality, we have been averaging between 250 and 400 views a day, hitting a record 525 views just two days ago.
The amount of support that village residents (as well as “ex-pats” and interested outsiders) have shown towards this little experiment of ours has been truly heartening. Almost every day, suggestions for articles are landing in our e-mail Inbox. Many of you have already written your own pieces for the site, or submitted your photos. More volunteers are joining our editorial team. Our comments boxes are becoming lively places in which to hang out, full of additional information, discussion, banter, and the occasional “heated debate”.
In short, you have chosen to embrace this site for what it was always intended to be: not only a “one-stop shop” for all village-related news and information, but also an interactive resource for the whole community, in which everyone can play a part.
The editorial team will be meeting up tomorrow morning, for the first time since Launch Day, to pool our ideas for forthcoming features and to plan the way forward. As well as the usual daily blog posts, you can expect many more pages to be added to the USEFUL INFO section of this site, offering more information and providing more space for local groups and societies to talk about their work. The CALENDAR section also be expanding, and our sister site for the Memorial Hall will be launching shortly.
There’s one more area in which some of you might be able to help. Despite our high traffic, we’re still a little short of incoming links from other sites. (OK, we’re very short of them.) If you run a website of your own, or if you know anyone else who does, then do please consider linking to us.
Now then – which of you is going to give us our 10,000th view? Over on the right hand column, you’ll find a little box marked BLOG STATS. Keep an eye on it during the course of Friday afternoon/evening – and as soon as you spot us reaching the magic number, then please let us know in the comments.
OK, Oscar acceptance speech over! Back to business!
Trying to time this comment to be the 10,000th page view!
and again!
You can tell it’s been a tough day at the office, cant you?
It is 17:21, and our little counter now shows 10,019 page views. Ta-dah! Milestone!
That’s amazing! We must all have too much time on our hands – but isn’t it great? It’s informative, entertaining amd as addictive as any soap. There’s a growing band of Tom’s Barn and Douglas’s Barn guests who log in from round the country whenever they are feeling homesick for here – which is quite often – and some of John’s colleagues from Lichfield are also becoming hooked!