New Look for the LMVP Website

The look of the LMVP website has been updated to be a little less “busy” when compared to the old one. Aside from cosmetic changes, the website has moved to a better server (a server is the computer that physically houses the web pages and makes them available on the internet) and should load much quicker. Not only is the new server faster, it also allows increased interactivity.

Ultimately, I would like to allow visitors to create graphs and tables based on LMVP data. In the meantime, I have made a couple of additions to encourage your interaction with the website.

First, we now have a discussion forum, available at www.lmvp.org/forum.

If you have never used an online forum before, check ours out and click around to get comfortable with the process. Try to think of it as a bulletin board where you can tack notes for anyone to read. Somebody might tack a response to your note and eventually a discussion evolves. Right now there’s not much to read, but I’ll post some more things soon and hopefully some of you will chime in, too!

My hope is that people will chat about lakes, volunteer issues, or whatever else they want to at the forum. I also hope the forum will facilitate some interaction among the LMVP volunteers. I will check the forum daily to read and respond to new posts.

The other new interactive element at the website is an online calendar. At www.lmvp.org/calendar, you can enter any lake-related information you want to share with others. I initially pictured the calendar as a way to help me avoid conflicts as I schedule data review sessions and lake visits. However, as I thought about it more, I realized that the calendar could be useful for anyone interested in Missouri lakes, lake cleanups, festivals, fishing tournaments, etc. I have posted a few things on the calendar, but the list is by no means complete. To post an event on the calendar, just click on the + icon for the day of your event and fill in the blanks. It’s easy! The forum and the calendar are open to all, and you don’t need to register for either. However, if the forum or the calendar should fill up with automotive sales events and Viagra advertisements, I reserve the right to make registration a requirement. Hopefully it won’t come to that!

Tony Thorpe

WEBSITE STATISTICS

The LMVP Website has undergone some changes recently (see above). A benefit of the update process is that I can now view detailed statistics regarding visits to the website. While none of the information I can get is personal or incriminating, it is informative. Here are some examples:

There have been 2600 visitors to the LMVP website in the first 20 days of February. That averages to 130 people per day. Of those 2600 visitors, 82 “bookmarked” the website. Meaning they’ll probably come back again.

The majority of visitors come to the LMVP website via the search engine Google (88%), with a few coming from Yahoo (8%) or MSN (1%). The remainder arrive via other search engines or by direct links from other websites.

The vast majority of visitors come from the USA, but many come from Europe and Australia. We have had 5 or more people view our website from Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and Turkey, to name a few. And we have had the occasional visitor from the Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Guam, Indonesia, Portugal, and Syria, to name just a few more.

For perspective, in early 2004, we had 300 people a month visit www.lmvp.org. and by the end of the year that grew to about 1000. For all of 2005, that number didn’t really change. However, since January the number of visitors per month has more than doubled! I appreciate the global attention that all of your hard work is attracting!

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