Ron Graham’s Report
— for Oct-Nov-Dec 2015
This page reports my voluntary ministry activities for the information of those who take a special interest in my work.
Dear Brethren... This report covers the fourth quarter of 2015.
Preaching at Bundaberg
During October, November, and December 2015, I presented 22 Sunday lessons in Bundaberg. These included 13 sermons, and 9 Bible class studies. Ten of the sermons were on the theme "Christ is All" and taken from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. These lessons emphasised the all-sufficiency or "plenitude" of Christ from various aspects. I presented each sermon with slides which are also viewable on the simplybible.com website.
Website simplybible.com
In the quarter, I added 10 new slide shows (The "Christ is All" series) and a new Bible crossword puzzle.
Social Media
Susanne has continued maintaining the facebook pages. The simplybible page has exceeded 800 likes. Susanne has produced many more photo images with encouraging Bible verses on them. They continue to attract attention.
Improving indexes
During the quarter I did a lot of work to make the website’s indexes even more usable with improved display —especially on small mobile devices such as smart phones. A very large website like simplybible.com is made much more useful if it has comprehensive indexes that are easy to browse. There are 233 pages of indexes, alphabetical and topical, which can be browsed manually. In addition, users have easy access to SiFi, the automatic index maker responding to words that the user enters.
Improving landing pages
Certain pages on simplybible.com have become "landing pages" because they have achieved a high ranking on search engines, especially Google. For example, suppose somebody asks Google "What does Amen mean?" Google will list the page from simplybible.com entitled "The Last Word". That page will be in the top five suggestions, so is likely to be visited.
When a visitor lands on such a page, it is important to encourage the visitor to go to other pages on the site as well. This is easier said than done, but I have been adding one or two attractive link panels at the end of articles. These have big buttons and a "tickler" synopsis to encourage the user to hit the button and view another page before leaving the site.
Expanding Cross References
In some landing pages, and in the main index pages, I also added "cross references" which are keywords that, when touched, cause SiFi to present a list of lessons relevant to that keyword. These cross references look and work exactly as those which SiFi itself generates, so the user has no new system to follow. What's more, I have no new system to invent, since the necessary programming was already in place from previous work, and needed only a few tweaks.
Website Usage
The figures for page views over the quarter continued to be high. For October 137,031; for November 124,822; and for December 106,208 (source Awstats). That is, once again, an average per month of more than 100,000 pageviews.
More than One Million for 2015
By November, page views for the year had passed one million, and by year's end reached 1,208,706. But what are "page views?"
- "Page views" refers to the total of pages opened by visitors.
- NOT just lesson pages are counted in "page views", but also index pages, information pages, puzzle and magazine pages, etc. However on most of these pages there is some teaching.
- NOT "visits" or "sessions" because one user may view more than one page in a visit to the site. The number of visitors can be only roughly estimated, but it would be of course less than the number of page views.
- NOT "hits" which is the count not only of pages but of all the other files that support the rendering of a page. We try to make the "hits" count as LOW as possible.
- NOT the pages that we view on our computers here at home. While working on the website, we need to view many of its pages online, but Awstats is directed to filter out these views, and they are not counted.
- NOT pages accessed by "spiders" or "bots" that "crawl" the site to index it for search engines. These bots can view thousands of our pages in a day, but Awstats filters them out and counts them separately, not as "page views".
- So, as we said, one page view is added to the count each time a user opens a page on the website. And in 2015 that happened more than a million times.
That explanation was a bit boring I know, but if you mention to someone that simplybible.com had over a million page views in 2015, at least you will have a clearer idea of what that means!
Thank You Again
Again may I say how much I appreciate those who keep on helping me in the Lord’s work. By sharing with me in the ministry you enable things that I could not possibly manage on my own.
Love and best wishes in Jesus.