Cuil and Base
Registered the website with Cuil, which currently has to be done by sending them an email. Strangely they seem to be picking up a lot of our older page links, and not the new ones created in mid-May. Hopefully this will be sorted as their crawling gets established. Google seems to be catching up with our new links now, more than 2 months on. Google is currently not recording any referrals from Cuil, which is a little odd since I've clicked through quite a lot.
I think we finally getting the problem of excluding internal hits in Google Analytics sorted. I hadn't realised the filters don't recognise dynamic IP ranges. We now have a static IP range in, and that looks as if it's helping: the intranet referrals are now flatlining. I just noticed that internal referrals from applications were still showing though - so I've put in a custom referral filter for that address. Gradually swatting them all down. It's a pity it doesn't show retrospectively: it's taking a long time to troubleshoot.
Also put a trial list of Short Courses into Google Base - fka Froogle and still in beta - to see if it helps with referrals. It has the advantage that it will display selected fields in the search result - so a short course can display dates and costs. The trial batch isn't showing costs, but since it's xml we can add custom fields, and that will be the next step.
Finally got photo galleries going on the new site, after a bit of a gap speeding up the gallery-making process. In the last design we tried to create galleries for all the subjects, but not all subjects lend themselves to photography. This time round galleries will only be made where it's really merited - as in motorsports, for example.
The review of July hits shows that enquiry form submissions and factsheet views are still doing well. Application form downloads are around 500 a month, and the events system is proving useful, judging by feedback at open mornings.