We know already from the ICT surveys and anecdotal comments that huge numbers of people make use of the website during snowy weather to check for information about the school.

This year, with the use of Google Analytics we are able to see exactly how useful that is. The graph below shows visitors to the site from 8th December to 7th January. Our usual visitor level is about 200 per day, dropping during school holidays. On Tuesday 5th January we had nearly 1500 (wishful thinking!) but on Wednesday 8th, the first day we closed all day, the number of visitors rose to nearly 3,000.

Of course some of this can be accounted for with people re-visiting the site, however from 4th January to 8th January we had over 3,000 absolutely unique visitors. Some of these will be the same people visiting from different computers, but it's still an astonishing number of visitors for a school of this size. We're also starting to see an increase in the number of people accessing the site from mobile devices and games consoles.

Thanks to our technicians I am able to update the website remotely from home. No I'm not sitting at my desk in school at 6:30 on a snowy morning!

Using Microsoft's terminal server connection, I can access the webserver using a broadband connection and update the home page. It's not as easy as in school as I cannot use Dreamweaver and have to edit the HTML code directly using notepad. The photos were loaded onto a Google Picasa web album and then a link to a slideshow coded directly into HTML.

However in the mornings I have to start early because as soon as everyone starts hitting F5 to refresh the homepage, the web server really slows up making editing a laborious process! Therefore I am usually one of the first people to be told whether school is closing.