Tag: analytics

Mobile device usage

Posted on by Mike Nolan

Last week I mentioned that while I couldn’t give a definitive list, our initial focus for a mobile website would be higher end devices. One thing we do know is what people are using at the moment to access our sites on the move:

Mobile device usage for www.edgehill.ac.uk

Data for the above chart is taken from 14th April – 13th June 2010 and the usual warnings apply to statistics sourced from Google Analytics – it only includes browsers executing JavaScript.

What is clear though is that Apple’s devices are massively more popular than anything else – over 75% of page views are from iPhones and iPod Touch browsers.

Mobile usage is fast moving so we’ll be continuing to monitor trends and statistics will drive much of what we do in our forthcoming developments.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Posted on by Mike Nolan

25 by Leo Reynolds.I started working at Edge Hill around the same time IT Services launched the GO portal and there was talk in the office the first Christmas about how many people would be logging in on Christmas day.

We don’t have the stats for Christmas day 2006, but we do have last couple of years so now you can check out how many people were logging in a year ago today (except I’m writing this in November so it’s not a year ago for me).

Last year GO received 840 visits on Christmas day.  Here’s an hourly breakdown – thick blue line is 2008 stats and the thin green line is 2007:

GO stats for Christmas day 2007 and 2008

The main Edge Hill website received even more visitors. Again, thick blue line is 2008 stats and the thin green line is 2007:

Edge Hill University website stats for Christmas day 2007 and 2008

I wonder if either site will beat those figures this year!

That’s all for 25 days of blogging – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts and thank you to everyone who’s commented.  See you in 2010 where we’ll start it all again with some very exciting projects on the cards (well, on the product backlog actually!)

Hot or Not?

Posted on by Mike Nolan

HeatmapInspired by University of Bath’s post about how they deleted the internet, last week we installed some heatmap software to plot where on a page users click.  We’ve had it running on a few pages and already some interesting patterns are showing.

We’ll be using these heatmaps to help up determine what’s working on the site and analyse behaviour patterns when migrating the intranet across to GO and in developing new designs for the homepage.

A stick of BarCamp Blackpool rock to the first person to identify which page the above heatmap comes from [excludes members of Web Services].

Top of the blogs

Posted on by Mike Nolan

The Web Services blog only started in April but in that time we’ve posted over 100 entries. As seems to be common around these times, I’ve done some digging into our Google Analytics stats and come up with a top ten list of popular posts. First the list then maybe I’ll talk a little about them!

1. Web development with symfony

2. Facebook > MySpace

3. Go PHP5!

4. Facebook Applications

5. The Paris Hilton effect…

6. Where Am I?

7. We’re still being used

8. Release Early, Release Often!

9. Jobs Website Live

10. University email from Google

So what does this show us? It shows the continued interest in Facebook. It’s just over a year since Facebook opened the doors to non-students and in that time growth has been massive. They’ve continued to innovate with their developer platform but have perhaps misread their users on the Beacon advertising system.

About half of the top posts are technical in nature including many about our use of the symfony framework. In the last year we’ve developed several symfony-powered sites including Hi, the applicant community and the brand new GO portal. Work is well underway on a couple of new parts of the corporate website – look out for more in the new year!

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