Ron Graham’s Report
— for Jul-Aug-Sep (3rd Quarter) 2018
This page reports my work on simplybible.com for the information of those who take a special interest in that work.
New on simplybible.com
In the third quarter of 2018, I added 17 new Bible study items to the website. Here are the items added...
Webpage ~Notes on 'Breaking Bread'
Webpage ~Who Wrote the Bible and Why?
Webpage ~Facts About Creation
Webpage ~Why Did God Make Humans?
Webpage ~Why Did Adam and Eve Disobey God?
Webpage ~Where Was God at Creation?
Webpage ~Prayer And Salvation
Webpage ~Prayer And Staying Saved
Webpage ~The Importance of Scripture
Webpage ~Regeneration, Born Again
Webpage ~“Born Again Christian”
—There are now 1411 Bible study webpages
YouTube ~Bible Reading (Acts 2).
YouTube ~Feed My Sheep (John 21:15-17).
YouTube ~What Is Your Life? (James 4:14).
YouTube ~Was Paul Crucified for You? (1Corinthians 1:13).
YouTube ~By What Authority...?
YouTube ~Seven Utterances on the Cross
Website Usage
The figures for page views over the quarter (total of pages opened by visitors) were:
| Month | Pageviews | Visits |
| Jul | 138,441 | 85,361 |
| Aug | 168,479 | 102,927 |
| Sep | 178,671 | 114,898 |
(Source Awstats).
That is an average for page views of around 162,000 a month or a daily average around 5400.
For the twelve months to the end of September, the number of page views exceeded 1.6 million: 1,676,672 (Source Awstats).
Page views Jul-Aug-Sep (Year Comparison)
2015 ❱❱❱❱❱❱ 301,621
2016 ❱❱❱❱❱❱❱❱ 397,158
2017 ❱❱❱❱❱❱❱❱ 417,672
2018 ❱❱❱❱❱❱❱❱❱ 485,591
Pageviews per Nation
As an indication of the site's outreach, here's a list of the countries in August 2018 in which more than 500 pages were viewed. (There are of course many other countries where less than 500 pages were viewed.)
PAGEVIEWS FOR NATIONS IN MONTH OF AUG 2018 United States.... 76,504 Nigeria.......... 11,242 Philippines...... 9,246 Australia......... 7,168 India............. 7,064 South Africa...... 7,052 Great Britain..... 6,025 Canada............ 5,170 Kenya............. 4,072 Poland............ 3,509 Angola............ 1,940 Singapore......... 1,780 Ghana............. 1,775 Indonesia......... 1,400 New Zealand....... 1,173 Malaysia.......... 1,088 Jamaica............. 877 United Arab Emirates 849 Germany............. 818 Uganda.............. 683 Zambia.............. 647 China............... 610 Tanzania............ 574 Russian Federation.. 556 (Source: Awstats)
Requests for PDF documents
In addition to pages viewed (as shown above) there were more than 4000 downloads of lessons in the PDF format:
| 2018 | DOWNLOADS |
| July | 1238 |
| August | 1441 |
| September | 1376 |
| Qtr TOTAL | 4065 |
(Source: Awstats)
Video Ministry Activity.
Whilst a selection of YouTube videos has been available for more than four years, now is an opportune time to develop this work. During the quarter, I did a major revision of the pages on simplybible.com that reference YouTube. This was necessary because the way YouTube does things has changed over the last four years.
There are two sections (or “channels”) in simplybible's collection of YouTube video clips. (1) Slide Shows with voice. This collection has a few miscellaneous items, but is mostly slide shows. (2) The other collection contains clips from the Australian Video Ministry video archive, circa 1980.
The resource for the slide shows is a large collection of slides made for lessons I presented at Bundaberg. These were made to display in a browser like Chrome or Safari. They have no audio, just the slides to click through. Since I made them, they have been accessible on simplybible.com —however my intention is to convert them one by one into YouTube videos with voice.
These YouTube slide shows are watched. For example four of the six videos added this quarter got more than 30 views each by the end of September. Another got 20 views, and another got 67 views in its first month. [Source: YouTube]. YouTube counts a view after a video has been running for at least 30 seconds.
Access to Website Broadens
In the past year I have noticed, while monitoring access to the website, that people come to the website via a much greater range of pages than a year or two ago. Pages that act as entry points to the site are called “landing pages”.
I have little control over the choice of landing pages. That's in the hands of the artificial intelligences who index the site, especially Google. I can only try to accommodate suitable headings, page descriptions, structure, and language in the general content, that will optimise the indexing.
This is not an exact science, but we seem to be slowly broadening the range of landing pages. This is good, because if the site depended on only a few landing pages, and one of them lost its rank in the index, that would mean a big drop in access to the site.
Google “Mobile First” Indexing
In September, Google notified me that simplybible.com will in future be indexed through their “Mobile First” indexing system. This means that content in the mobile (small screen) version will be indexed rather than content in the desktop or personal computer (big screen) version. Fortunately simplybible.com has the same content and the same URL (website address) for all screen sizes, so that there will most likely be no impact on the indexing of the site, and I do not need to change the site in response.
Background:
In June 2008 I created a separate small mobile site called aptja.mobi which operated during the years that mobile phones were limited as browsers and were not very “smart”. But aptja.mobi became obsolete and I closed it. As phones got smarter, I kept on developing simplybible.com’s presentation on the small screens.
Fortunately, at the time of that development, css style sheets were enabling the same content to be made viewable on all screen sizes, using what is known as “media queries”. So today simplybible.com is set up for mobile devices primarily, but still works well on laptops, larger tablets, personal computers and televisions. This approach is recognised as best practice by Google’s Mobile First indexing scheme.
Trending Upwards
This graph from Google shows clicks per day (for simplybible.com on Google Search) between 28 June and 14 September 2018, in the range between 1300 and 3800 clicks per day.
More than half of visits to simplybible.com occur through Google search.
Thank You
Many users of simplybible.com give thanks and praise to God for the teaching we provide. In an emailed letter of thanks for the website, one person said, “I give God praise [and thanks] to you and your team for putting it together.”
Well, you are the "team" and many people appreciate your help.
Thank you for keeping on helping me in the Lord’s work. Thank you for your prayers also, and your interest and confidence in my work on the website. We reach and teach thousands of people, around 3000 visitors daily around the world. By sharing with me in this work, you make it possible for you and me to "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation".
Love and best wishes in Jesus.