Ron Graham’s Report
—Apr-May-Jun 2011
This page reports my voluntary ministry activities April to June 2011 —for the information of those who take a special interest in my work.
Dear Brethren... This report covers the second quarter of 2011.
Preaching at Bundaberg
During April, May, and June 2011, I presented 20 lessons in Bundaberg. These lessons covered a wide range of topics including the Origin of Life on Earth, Forgiveness in Old Testament Times, the Resurrection Story, Medicine and God's Providence, and the Name of Jesus. A few of the lessons were new and never preached before. This quarter, I did not follow any particular theme, but provided a variety of topics and filled in a few gaps where important topics had not been covered for a while.
The Website simplybible.com
Daily Visitors
The number of daily visitors to the site (according to Google's analysis) continued to be 1000 to 1300 every day. The only day of the week on which the number of visitors dipped just below 1000 was Saturday. Visitors viewed 1500 to 2300 pages each day. These numbers for daily page views are very conservative. My internet provider’s statistics show around 3300 page views per day, which includes such things as the listings provided by SiFi the search robot when visitors request a topic list.
Browsers
There are some interesting trends in the browsers people are using to visit the website. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera combined are used by 55% of visitors, against 42% for Internet Explorer (which not long ago hogged about 90%). Android browsers provided 3% of the visitors, the first time this kind of browser (for mobile touch screen) has figured. I check and test the site on all six browsers mentioned above. This rapidly changing browser environment is one important reason why I have done so much work on upgrading the website.
All Nations
The countries represented by most visitors to the site are, naturally, English speaking. In a typical month, in round figures, the site gets 17,000 visitors from the USA; 3000 each from Australia-NZ, the Phillipines, and the United Kingdom; 1000 each from India, Canada, and South Africa. However many other countries access the site, totalling more than a thousand “other” visitors over a month.
Improvements
The website grew by four lessons, and now provides 1008 Bible lessons, not counting quizzes, training, and other study pages. The focus during the quarter was not to make the site bigger, but better. I worked on three “betterment” projects.
- I further improved SiFi —simplybibleFinder the site's internal search system. This work required, apart from a number of small programming changes, a major rewrite of one database script. As a result, future building of the databases will be easier for me, and results for the user will be more specific and informative.
- I designed some improvements to page layout and design. One of these is an iconic image at the top right of the lesson to add interest to the page. It also adds to the ways in which I can attract people to the site through Google and similar search engines, because they now search for images as much as for text. These improvements are being incorporated into lessons as I review and revise them.
- I further improved the topical indexing of the site. The alphabetical indexes cannot be much improved, but I had not yet taken full advantage of the underlying topical structure of the site. Topics on the site come under three main headings, (1) Jesus, (2) Bible Books, (3) Life and Light. Under these headings there are 20 topic clusters or subheadings, and under those more than 70 topical series, and within those more than 1000 lessons.
As I continue to revise and upgrade lessons on the site, I will be greatly assisted by the above improvements.
Thank You Again
Again I say a big thank you to the people who have assisted me in my work. Without you, I could not do it.
Love and best wishes in Jesus,