Welcome to Dacorum Sub Aqua Club Site Statistics

This page shows the usage statistics of the site in its first 4 years.

Hits Site and Page views by Year

The site was created in September 1999 but statistics were only recorded after May 2000. Many of the statistics of 2000 are skewed because there was a lot of testing taking place early in the life of the site. Testing is untypical of normally usage because its aim is to be comprehensive.

We have not noticed in our face to face dealings with people who have an interest in the club, for instance recruits, that they have used this web site to discover us. It may be that the increase in hits is caused by factors unrelated to the site or club such as increased access to the internet, particularly from the workplace, or interest by local residents.

Average Hits and Page views per Day by Year

The ratio of Site Hits to Page Views has fallen from over 1:3 in 2000 to under 1:2.5 in 2003. This indicates that surfers, once at the site, view fewer pages before moving on. So, on the whole, although we receive more surfers, they study the site less than surfers did previously. They have less interest in our club or diving: it is possible we're attracting more bored office workers than people needing to find out about us and what we do.

The most popular pages

Notice that although there have been a total of about 8800 hits and 21000 page views, there have only been 4100 Home page views. The 4700 (8800 - 4100) hits that did not pass through the Home page were presumably page views direct from search engines: so, people searched on specific criteria which our pages matched.

Another interesting thing about these statistics by individual page is the Links page. For a long time this site had no Links page. The reason for that was that the only thing this site can do better than anyone else is to describe our club. Providing unique information about itself gives the site most of its value; so encouraging surfers to go off and read other sites can be self defeating. The Links page was added to point club members to useful internet resources. The fact that so many surfers have used the Links suggests wild navigation by them - either they are easily distracted from this site or they made a mistake choosing to come to this site. The Links page will be removed from the menu to make it less accessible to casual surfers.

Percentage of hits by month

Interest in the web site closely follows the diving season.

Percentage of hits by time of day

Usage of this site broadly follows the time zone of the UK with about 95% of use taking place between 6am and 1am UK time. This suggest most people coming to the site are from the UK. The four hours of highest use are from midday to 3pm. Usage during this 16% of the day represents 28% of total use of the site. The peak occurs when office workers are on their lunch breaks and therefore get more time to surf. 

The 1% background level between 1am and 6am relates partly to surfers from outside the UK and could indicate that up to 24% (1% for each 24 hours) of users of the site are foreign.

Hits by day of the week

Usage of the web site increases on week days. Possibly surfers are busy at weekends - diving, of course - but have time during the working week to surf.