We have been using Google Analytics to keep an eye on the website since February 2009 and it has highlighted some very useful factors. Since February, the website has had over 5,500 visitors and over half of those have been unique visitors. Using cookies, Google knows whether you have visited the Y Pant website before and if you haven’t records you as a unique visitor.

You may remember that the old website didn’t take up a lot of screen space. It was created for older monitors. Using Google Analytics we’ve been able to see that 95% of our users view the website using a much larger screen size. For the technically minded, this is a screen resolution of more than 1024x768 pixels. Because of this, we decided to recreate the website template using a much larger screen size, with more space devoted to content than before.

We’ve also been able to see the Browsers and Operating Systems that our visitors use. It’s no surprise that Internet Explorer on Windows is the most popular. We use this in school and that is where most of our users come from. However an increasing proportion of visitors are using alternative browsers on Windows such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari as well as those using Macs. Although tiny in percentage terms, people also visit the site using a huge variety of other devices such as iPhones, Nintendo Wii, Playstations and other mobile devices. What does this mean for the website? Well although we are safe to test it on Internet Explorer, it’s important that we do test using other browsers to ensure that the content is displayed just as well. Mobile devices are not currently that important to us but in future we may have to consider setting up alternative information pages to display properly on small-screen mobile devices.

What do people look at?

Over 30% of visitors just look at the home page. Given that this is the home page default in school it’s actually quite a low number! Other popular pages are the Music department website, the Info for Pupils page (which contains the links to Reach and Moodle) and contact information. As a result of this we’ve decided to make more information (such as links) available directly from the home page, or reduced the number of clicks needed to get there.

Where do people come from?

Unsurprisingly almost all our visitors come from the UK. However we have had visitors from 26 other countries including France (23 visitors), the USA and China. It seems that new content on the site (such as a report on the trip to France in March) tends to coincide with visits from that country.

This is a tiny selection of the data generated by Google Analytics. We will continue to use it to try and make sure we are providing the most useful content to all our visitors. If you have any further questions please contact me on lucy.bunce@ypant.co.uk.