Newham Council has increased the visitors to the Gateway site by placing a reference to www.newham.net in the header of their web site. A number of other local bodies have linked back to the site including NewVic and Newham Training Network and we anticipate that this will increase once the site begins to be publicised. The Council also helped by adding the URL's of a large number of business sites and increasingly users are adding their own.
In October it is planned to add a Newham Calendar to the gateway to be followed by a classified adverts system. Also in October we will start submitting the site to Search Engines though obviously a few have already found the site and http://www.northernlight.com, has us listed at number 3 on a straight search on the word "Newham" (the council's Employment vacancies page has the first slot)
| Item | September | October |
| Amount of use (*1) | ||
| Number of links | 127 | 200 |
| Total hits | 9,867 | 19,173 |
| Total visits | 1,814 | 4,000 |
| Total visitors | 829 | 1,836 |
| Visits per day | 14.7 | 24.7 |
| Time per visit | 342 secs | 257 secs |
| How the site is used (*2) | ||
| Home page visits | 1,642 | 3,483 |
| Content Search | 591 | 1,148 |
| Links Search | 347 | 854 |
| Arts and Entertainment | 230 | 411 |
| History | <50 | 336 |
| Education & Learning | 147 | 332 |
| Who the site is used by (*3) | ||
| United Kingdom | 729 | 1,297 |
| United States | 471 | 1,299 |
| Germany | 8 | 15 |
| Australia | 4 | 15 |
| New Zealand 7 14 | 7 | 14 |
| Netherlands 4 10 | 4 | 10 |
| Canada 1 4 | 1 | 4 |
| France 0 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Denmark 0 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Greece 0 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Austria 1 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Hong Kong 1 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Norway 1 1 | 1 | 1 |
(*1) The figures shown are cumulative. The "hits" figure is requests for information and is often used but it is very misleading as simply loading the home page gives a hit for every graphic. Interestingly the site is starting to get used at weekends with Sat and Sun combined giving as many hits as Monday.
(*2) The site allows users to search for content on other sites, search for links within the database and to browse the pages of links. The figure for the most popular user pages (excluding administration)shows how the site is used in practice. The most interesting change this month is the popularity of the history links.
(*3) Where the visits are coming from is interesting. The US figure is very misleading as it depends on the the requesting server's name and all .com addresses are regarded as US! - the other countries are genuine though. There are visits the system cannot trace so the total visits figure is different from the breakdown: