Website traffic

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This a report on the number of accesses of the Living Streets website from August 2002 to March 2008. WCN, which hosts the site, produces a file with a line of information for every time a page on our website is accessed. This includes the time, the name of the page being accessed, the IP address of the user, if the access is the result of a link from another page the name of that page, and details of the browser or search engine query.

In what follows I have deleted lines referring to images or style sheets (which the user has little control over) and tried to delete all lines which result from hits by spiders or crawlers (for example, computers gathering data for search engines). So the data should correspond mostly to genuine accesses by real humans. However, some automated hits will still have got through.

Hits on htm, html, pdf and txt files.

This graph shows the total number of hits on html (ordinary web pages), pdf and text files each month.

The value for October, 2006 is missing. As we would have hoped, there is a general upward trend.  If I had included the hits from the automated data collections the numbers would have been about twice as big.

Number of visitors

This graph shows my estimate of the number of visitors each month. The red graph is for people who look just at one page, blue for people who look at 2 and black for those that look at three or more. Generally a person who looks at just one page has realised that this is not what they are looking for and has gone away (although some may have found exactly what they were looking for and didn't stop to browse). The black line is the one we are really interested in.

A visitor is meant to be one person visiting the site in one session. If one person visits twice on the same day in two separate sessions, their visits may be counted as either one or two depending on how their connection to the Internet is set up. Visiting on two separate days is counted as two visitors. Visits spanning midnight are likely to be counted as two.

Again we see the general upward trend with a lot of people not lingering.

More popular pages over last 3 months

This lists the number of hits on our more popular pages over the last three months. The column total count shows the total number of hits. The following columns categorise the hits according how the page was accessed.

• User or unknown means the visitor explicitly entered the website address in the Browser or the website host couldn't identify the source of the link;
• Internal link means the page was accessed from another page on the Living Streets site;
• External link means the page was accessed from a page on someone else's website;
• Google means the page was accessed from the Google search engine;
• Other search means the page was accessed from some other search engine.

Large PDF files tend to be biased upwards in this table because visitors often make a number of attempts to download them. See success rates for PDF file downloads.

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