Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Webmaster Notes for Annual Meeting

The new website has been up and running since March 1, 2014.

Our goals for the new website were as follows:
  1. Provide a single starting point for everything our club members need in the digital world
  2. Provide more value to our club members by leveraging current technology of web design
  3. Grow membership through promotion of the club beyond the newsletter through the website, social media and other channels
  4. Provide more real time content from Club Offers and Staff
  5. Consider that some members will want to access the site from a mobile device, while others will have limited bandwidth to access the website from their home computers
  6. Help to control or reduce the cost to develop and maintain the website
  7. Streamline processes to make the management of the club easier
Our membership growth can be partially attributed to the high levels of traffic on the new website.
  • In the first 9 months, we had 22,000 page views (2500 a month or 80 a day) by 4400 unique visitors 
  • The geography breakdown was 15% of viewers were from Escanaba, 14% from Marquette County, 5% from Iron Mountain, 4% from Ironwood, 4% from Houghton, 3% from Chicago and minor others make up the rest.
  • Even though 81% of our traffic are from desktops (70% from Windows, 11% from Mac) we did have 19% from Mobile (15% iOS, 2% Android). We do have mobile versions of all of our pages.
Things that are working well:
  • Race Directors are completing the online request to have races listed on our calendar
  • Blogging has helped us reach our membership with additional content
  • Use of Social Media (Twitter, Facebook) has helped us reach more members with club information
Things that could improve:
  • Submission of race results have been very low this year compared to other years. 
  • Management of membership lists (actively working this process to make less manual)
Please submit all comments, suggestions for improvement and other notes to Eric Charette UPRoadRunners@gmail.com