June is out of the way - a look at the stats.
By BrianC
July 2 2003
June is the most difficult month to run a site such as this. That said, not only have we survived, we have thrived. Here we look at your sites figures for the quietest month of the year.
With the season ending in early May all the end of season stuff Player/Supporter/Game of the season etc. stuff has long gone. In July the team get together for training, we can expect an honest fixture list, people will be starting to think about Henley and the world tour of Ulster. In June there is next to nothing happening in the Rugby world.
At the start of this month I knew that things would fall off but hoped that we would manage 150k hits. With a bit of luck and effort I even believed we might double last Junes figure of 85k. You've outdone my best hopes, last month we had 200493 hits on this site. Given that the first month we ever crossed the 200k barrier was March (St. Patrick's Weekend, serious relegation worries, et all.) this is quite a remarkable achievement. Yet again, whilst not top of the tree in terms of total hits, we had visits from more different people than any other rugby site on Sportnetwork.
The 'Meet the Family' series has undoubtedly been a huge success. Last month saw our greatest ever number of story hits. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have contributed to this series. Without your help goodness knows what I could have done. We still have eight of these in the bank, ready to be released. This month I'm going to reduce the frequency of their release to once every two days rather than daily. Once the series has run it's course it is my intention to compile them all into one reference page. This will become a fixed part of the site, linked from the right hand side and from the 'Beginners Guide'. If there is anyone out there who still wants to contribute to this series please drop me a mail - brianc@londonirish.org - and I'll send you the template of questions.
A special word of thanks goes to Bisach for providing me with his CD of photographs from the season. This has provided us with many caption opportunities which have helped keep the messageboard going.
How will we cover the quiet period next year? My co-eds know what my plan is, indeed I have already started work on it. The rest of you I'm afraid, will just have to wait until next June to find out what it is.