AGENDA #5a
BUDGET WORKING PAPER
TO: W. Calvin Horton, Town Manager
FROM: Bob Avery, Information Technology Director
SUBJECT: Website Usage Analysis
DATE: May 13, 2002
This report provides information regarding the Town’s website usage as requested by the Town Council during the Information Technology Departmental budget presentation on February 27, 2002.
The Town of Chapel Hill maintains two web sites to provide information for citizens. One web site is hosted on a commercial server operated by PSINet, Inc. and the other is hosted on a server located at Town Hall.
The PSINet site (www.townofchapelhill.org) was established in 1998 to provide a reliable web presence for the Town. The commercial service offered 24 hour maintenance and security for the web site and provided higher access speed for users than was possible from Town Hall. This service is contracted for a fixed fee but includes additional fees if data storage and access exceed certain levels. The site content is developed and maintained by Town staff.
The Town Hall web site has been in place since 1997. We developed the initial web site at Town Hall and shortly thereafter added the commercial site described above because the Internet connection speed for Town Hall was too slow to support the number of citizens who accessed the site. Since then we have adjusted site content so that both sites provide access to current information and older information is archived on the Town Hall server. This helps reduce service fees for data storage. Recently, the Town Hall Internet access speed has been increased, which will give citizens improved access to the information available on the Town Hall server.
During the Information Technology Budget presentation on February 27, 2002, a chart of the January 2002 Town web site usage on the PSINet server was displayed. The Council requested further explanation of the web usage elements depicted on the graph.
DISCUSSION
The web site usage chart is provided by PSINet as a service to its customers to aid in monitoring Internet traffic. PSINet employs a commercial analysis program that tracks web site activity. The program will display basic information such as the number of visitors connecting to the site and the amount of data transferred to the user during the visit. Other information items are used to evaluate performance of the web site servers.
The chart which is shown on Attachment 1 depicts four web site information elements: hits, files, sites, and kilobytes (of data) transferred. Descriptions of these elements as defined by the analysis tools are listed on the attachment.
Charts for the first quarter of 2002 are provided in Attachment 2. These show high usage rate for January as compared to February and March (73,377 maximum hits per day in January vs. 29,106 for February and 26,547 for March). The higher activity for January is attributed to the initiation of free bus fare on Town buses. January also produced an unusually high peak period around January 7 because of three events that occurred during that time: a snow storm, the start of free bus fare and the return of university students for second semester.
Transit information continues to be one of the key interest items for visitors to our site. Based on the amount of information transferred to visitors (kilobytes of data transferred), the transit information represented 31, 27, and 47 percent of visitor interest for each of the months of January, February, and March. Other key topics of interest are employment openings, leisure activities and Council agenda items.
1. Usage Chart for Town of Chapel Hill Web Site for January 2002 (p. 3).
2. Usage Charts for Town of Chapel Hill Web Site for First Quarter 2002 (p. 4).