New College year
The College enters a new academic year and enrolment is under way. Numbers are good despite the credit crunch. Website hits on factsheets and enquiries continue to rise, though overall hits have levelled off. I think this is not necessarily a bad thing - though big numbers are nice, it may be that some page clicks in the past were generated by people not being able to find what they needed. Now that we are seeing factsheet and enquires well used, it's clear that at least some people are getting to the information quickly. We've also managed to link some admissions information in to the factsheet system, so that we can flag up when FE courses and Short Courses are filling up (or are full), thereby helping people know where they stand, and saving time for admissions.
Meanwhile on the stats front we see many more people accessing from widescreens - we will be looking at some tweaking of the site to accommodate this. And at the other end of the scale we are beginning to get low res accesses creeping in, via iPhones and netbooks - we will have to address these widely different viewing requirements.
Google Base proved largely useless to us, so we have dropped it for the moment. Cuil search engine, mentioned here before, seems to have sunk without trace. Bing though, the new Microsoft effort, is making some impact, and helping us. The new browser, Chrome, is also appearing in our stats.
When we look at network speeds, there has been a slight resurgence of dialup, which seemed to be vanishing a couple of months ago. Again, I wonder if people are dropping their broadband contracts to save a bit of cash.
Correlating Google analytics and our own hits remains tricky, mainly due to the different filtering methods we are using to remove internal college hits from both of these. Though they roughly agree when we look at, say, a specific referrer, we now have Google saying our hits overall are up on last year, while our internal records say they have levelled off. It's probably a good thing to have both: it reminds us of how subject to interpretation these statistics are, and between the two methods we can get a general impression.