Today I drove to work. To most people that's not such a big deal, but for me it's a goal I've been aiming toward for more than a year. For my first couple of weeks back I was driven by a transportation service, but now I've got my own car modified with hand controls and can ferry myself. Just like many other everyday tasks, simply driving somewhere now can be an ordeal: transfer into the car, take the wheelchair apart and bring that in, then the opposite at the other end. It's all straightforward enough, but can go horribly wrong when, for example, one of the wheelchair wheels goes rolling off on its own when you're leaning out the driver's door and trying to assemble the chair-as happened to me when I got home one day. Then what? That said, driving myself and other people around is a whole new level of independence, and I've gone through three tanks of gas in just a couple of weeks.
Anyway, now that I'm back at the office at least a couple days a week, it's time to take on more workload than what I've been doing at home the last few months. One of my new tasks is to regularly update the Sport Rider website and add content that's relevant to the magazine. I used to look after the site when it was in its infancy, but stopped when our publishing frequency ramped up and the website work was farmed out. In the last year, however, we've taken much of it back in-house and it's our responsibility to look after. Now that I won't be able to do a lot of work that I could before my accident, I can devote more time to other, non-riding related things, like the website.
One of the interesting aspects of working with the internet is the plethora of usage statistics that is available. Not only can we see how many people are visiting the site and how many pages they are viewing, but also we can access statistics such as what pages are being viewed the most, what site a person came from to visit ours, the search term entered in a search engine to get to the site, and how much time is spent on each page. It all shows a picture of what people are interested in and gives us some direction for adding content.
Usually, the statistics show what you'd expect as far as popular pages and number of viewers. Other times, however, things can get really shaken up. For example, when Honda showed its NAS concept bike a few years ago, I uploaded the press kit and photos to our site. It was buried in the features section and I didn't think much of it, but that page remained one of the top-five visited pages for more than three years after it was uploaded, and is still in the top-100 regularly. Due to the snowball effect of web searching (the more popular a page is, the higher it will show in search results), the SR page is the first result in a Google search of "Honda NAS". Of course, this can all go the opposite way and a story or page I'm sure will be popular goes nowhere.
All this data, along with information from other sources, points to a fact that has me a bit stymied. It appears that, for the most part, people that read the magazine do not visit the website and people visiting the website are not regular readers of the magazine. It's not like the two are the same-in fact, we've made a big effort to set the website apart from the magazine, with content that is different but complements each issue. While there is some crossover between the paper issue and the website, the numbers leave me scratching my head at times. It's frustrating because if even a small portion of the internet people read the magazine, we'd see a nice increase in circulation. Likewise, if a percentage of the magazine readers visited the website, we'd have a bump in the traffic numbers.
My question is, then, what would you-as a reader of the printed magazine-like to see on the website? We already have a fairly extensive archive of handy information, including performance numbers, suspension settings and dyno charts for practically every bike tested since the magazine's inception, so that you don't have to go thumbing through a pile of back issues trying to find a horsepower number for your buddy's VFR750. There are wallpapers, information about the new sportbikes, videos, new-product information and press releases, a message board and other things you'd expect to see on a magazine's website. But what could we do differently? Should we take a video camera along to the track and catch behind-the-scenes footage? Record sound clips in the dyno room? Post more staff blogs?
For us, we'd much rather post selective, useful content that complements the magazine to boost traffic numbers, rather than simply using the shotgun approach and posting mounds of press releases and information marginally relating to sportbikes. That simply clutters the site up and makes it harder for people to find what they are looking for. Here's your chance to help us make the Sport Rider website better: e-mail us at srweb@sorc.com with your comments and suggestions and we'll do our best to incorporate those ideas to make our site worth visiting regularly.
That wraps up another day at the office for me. Hopefully I can keep my wheels under control when I get home this time.