SNS WEB PRESENCE

Both the White Admiral and SNS internet pages have been revamped during the past year to bring them up to date, to cater for old and new browser software and newer computer displays. A start has also been made on making the pages more user friendly for the handicapped, though more remains to be done in this area. The SNS pages have more content now, including an interactive calendar making it easier to plan for field trips etc. The number of readers of the SNS website has grown steadily over the last year from four a day in May 2005 to a peak of 22 per day in April 2006. 1,647 hits were made on the SNS home page this year, although many may well be returning visitors and owing to the way statistics are compiled this number does not count people who go straight to a particular page further into the site.

White Admiral has also steadily increased its readership from eight a day at the start of the year to a peak of 24 a day when issue 63 was launched. In total 6,912 hits occurred on the White Admiral home page - an average of 20 a day, although some may well be reading one of the past 23 editions of the magazine which are now on line. The average number of distinct readers for each edition is about 250. Members sometimes ask if it is right to put White Admiral on line free of charge to non-members. In reality our British internet readers come from all over the country, not just Suffolk and readers from other counties are less likely the join the society in any case. In fact the majority of our readers are now from overseas and would certainly not be likely to become members when they live on the other side of the world. Running the sites costs a few pounds a year and is a very cheap way to get our message across. Writing for White Admiral will also give you, the members, a world wide audience – something to consider when thinking about putting pen to paper.

This year our internet readers were distributed as follows:-

70% from America
13% from Britain
2% each from Turkey and Sweden
1% each from Australia, Germany, France, Spain and Singapore
Smaller amounts came from China, Canada, Poland and other EU countries.

Finally a word about ‘referrers’ i.e. sites that point to the SNS or White Admiral from a link on their page or in response to a search:-

Google came top as we might expect with 4099 referrals, Yahoo a poor second with 242.
But I was surprised that 75 people arrived at our sites from the CNN site!
33 came via the US National Parks Service
And 17 inexplicably came via a US Military search engine!