Who’s surfing The Lee?By Colin Sully
By running The Lee website on a standard commercial server (someone else’s computer that stays permanently accessible through the internet) we also get a useful standard package that analyses visits to the website each month.
Hundreds of people now arrive at the website each month because they have it marked as a ‘favourite’ and simply click on the link to take them straight there. Others arrive in the process of searching for something on the world-wide-web. But what exactly are they looking for?
About half of those that arrived as a result of searches had set out intentionally to look for something to do with The Lee – either seeking out the website by name or searching for general information about ‘The Lee’, or in some cases looking for specific information about The Lee Cricket Club, The Lee Flower Show, one of our village pubs or even ‘art club at Lee Common School 08’!
I assume that these people are in the main finding what they are looking for. But what of the rest?
Well, around 30% of those who use a search engine to get to The Lee website are looking for ‘old churches’. Interesting! Have we seen an increase in visitors to The Lee Old Church in the past two years, I wonder? There is much on the website that will be of interest to these visitors, including a recently-added, extended history of the Old Church based on information provided by The Old Church Trust (thanks to John Glanfield), as well as an information leaflet on the ‘New’ Church.
As for the rest of the ‘surfers’, they seem to be arriving at The Lee website in a rather less focussed way – as a result of searches based, for example, on ‘prettiest cottage’ or ‘dog classes’ or – bizarrely – simply ‘horse’.
These visitors may not always turn up exactly what they were looking for but hopefully find something of interest @ www.thelee.org.uk.