Looking ahead

• Posted by Paul January 17, 2012 - 697 views

  

  Today I renewed the site for another month on the Ning Network and renewed the domain name (with GoDaddy) that - as Vix mentioned yesterday - was due for renewal. This means that we are definitely here for at least a further month, and most likely longer.

  I've been keeping a beady eye on the stats since the start of the year. The good news is that there has been a steady rise in activity right across the site. New members are coming on board steadily and a reasonable proportion are already participating in the site. The Chat session we had on Sunday went off very well, and things are generally looking quite promising. 

  Currently we get an average of 200 members logging in per day, and about 500 members login at least on a weekly basis. I've no way to know how many other members stop by the site and don't bother to login - since you can view almost everything as a 'guest' it may well be that some members check the site, but don't login unless they intend to post. 

  Whilst this means that a lot of people have quite likely drifted away - current membership is 1824 - that is still a healthy sized community by any standards. 

  When it comes to the number of people (members or not) visiting this site, the Google Analytics show that we are currently running about 3000 visits per day. Now we had a massive 'spike' just before Skyrim came out, but that figure compares favourably with the levels that we had back around September through October last year. 

  Most days we have between 140-160 'posts', which tend to be around half on the forums, a quarter in the Groups, and the rest across blogs, photos and Q&A. Again, that compares favourably with the number of comments we had on the old blog site.

  The conclusion that these stats lead me to is that - if you take away the huge, but totally unsustainable, surge in activity that came just around November 11th, we are running at the same, or even marginally higher - levels of activity, posting and visitors that we had before November. And I think that's a cause for considerable encouragement about the future!

  So, that's a summary of where I think we are right now. Tomorrow I'm going to have a bit of a re-jig of things... change a few things around to 'freshen up' the site. I'll make a post then to explain how I hope we'll be able to move things forward.

  Thanks everyone for their continued support