From the GreeNR Action Plan:
The City website received approximately 26,000 page hits per day, including 1,100 hits to the home page, a statistic which may better represent the number of daily visitors to the site. Less than one thousand individuals subscribe to municipal email bulletins. The City does not currently maintain funding for newsletter production and distribution.
Whoever wrote this does not know much about this because no one talking about “hits”. It is a metric that went out of fashion about 10 years ago. People talk about page views and unique visitors. I think what they mean is they are getting 26,000 page views and when they say 1,100 “hits” to their home page and that better representing the number of daily visitors to the site that probably means they are getting 1,100 unique visitors to the site. Until they just say how many page views and unique visitors they get to their site I can’t be sure. Talk of the Sound publicly discloses our traffic data (we are getting about 850 unique visitors a day on average). If they really are getting 1,100 “uniques” a day (I doubt it since the content is still very static) I can guess that a good deal of their referred traffic is coming from Talk of the Sound as we send people there all the time (like all web sites, about 50-60% of their traffic comes from Google).
The plan talks about encouraging New Rochelle residents to “subscribe” to the City’s official website which does note make sense to me. Not that it is bad idea, in that I do not understand what is meant by “subscribing” to the City’s web site? People can visit the site, bookmark it or whatever but unless they are talking about requiring registration (which I doubt) or creating widespread adoption of RSS Syndication (again, I doubt it) then the term “subscribe” is not the right word. They also want people to “subscribe”to the public news notification system by which they might mean the Reverse 911 system and/or an email mailing list. If the goal is to have awareness of the site at 50% then I think they are already there; if you ask any person who uses the Internet whether the City of New Rochelle has a web site the answer will be “yes” or “I assume so”.
One pretty sad statistic is that, according to the report, the Journal-News, reaches only 20% of the households in southern Westchester County.
Even more sad is that the report calls the Journal News is “New Rochelle’s major daily newspaper”.