Final Report on Personal Site
Jdicharia.weebly.com acts as a personal site that hosts my digital portfolio, digital resume and
blog. Weebly, a free website maker, hosts the site, providing all the necessary tools for a portfolio, resume
and blog. The site’s overall goal to keep friends, family and colleagues informed, while also engaging future employers achieves itself through the site's multitude of pages. The digital resume allows visitors to quickly glance at my life as a whole, but also allows visitors to investigate further into certain activities by clicking hyperlinks that open a page about the particular event or accomplishment. The blog was the most popular aspect of the site, and covered topics such as refereeing, my personal life and my venture to Oxford for the LSU vs. Ole Miss game, and I used Facebook and Twitter to target the demographics that would be interested in my blog posts (soccer referees, family and friends going to Ole Miss).
Google Analytics tracked the website and recorded its progress from the
site’s launch in September to today. As of today, 335 visits were made to the site with 755 page views.
Figure 1
blog. Weebly, a free website maker, hosts the site, providing all the necessary tools for a portfolio, resume
and blog. The site’s overall goal to keep friends, family and colleagues informed, while also engaging future employers achieves itself through the site's multitude of pages. The digital resume allows visitors to quickly glance at my life as a whole, but also allows visitors to investigate further into certain activities by clicking hyperlinks that open a page about the particular event or accomplishment. The blog was the most popular aspect of the site, and covered topics such as refereeing, my personal life and my venture to Oxford for the LSU vs. Ole Miss game, and I used Facebook and Twitter to target the demographics that would be interested in my blog posts (soccer referees, family and friends going to Ole Miss).
Google Analytics tracked the website and recorded its progress from the
site’s launch in September to today. As of today, 335 visits were made to the site with 755 page views.
Figure 1
Analytics help determine the primary audience receiving my message. Nearly 94 percent of total visits came from American viewers, having a 61.83 percent bounce rate and an average visit duration of around two minutes. Bounce rate refers to visitors who only looked at the entrance point of the site (either directly or through referral by social media) and did not interact with the website. Due to the methods used to advertise my site and its content, visitors were more likely to only read the page that the link brought them to. Both on Facebook and on Twitter, I posted links to specific features of my site including certain blog posts. Based off of the average visit duration, the majority of viewers read the blog post and then returned to the media they had been using. These statistics point to the possibility of a developing niche community, soccer referees.
After labor day, I posted a blog about my time officiating at the Disney Soccer Showcase Qualifiers and a specific match I refereed during my time there. The period immediately after publishing the blog post experienced the most activity the website has seen, exemplified in the number of visits in September (as shown in Figure 1) and the number of visitors in September (as shown in Figure 2).
Figure 2
After labor day, I posted a blog about my time officiating at the Disney Soccer Showcase Qualifiers and a specific match I refereed during my time there. The period immediately after publishing the blog post experienced the most activity the website has seen, exemplified in the number of visits in September (as shown in Figure 1) and the number of visitors in September (as shown in Figure 2).
Figure 2
My hypothesis that I can develop a niche audience is supplemented by the decline in visitors after September. There were no more blog posts that contained specific match-incident information from a referee's perspective. I blogged about fitness training, branding and Oxford, Miss. During that time, I never reached the previous amount of maximum visitors. This information proves that I should focus my blog's attention on refereeing, and in order to do so, I must know who within the refereeing community views the site. Figure 3 gives a breakdown of the geographical locations of visitors in Louisiana, while Figure 4 shows all of the states the site has reached.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Figure 4
After observing the concentration of visitors around the United States, the various group of states reached by my message and the highest concentrated areas of activity must be explained. In order to spread my message among the referee community, I shared links to my blog in a Facebook group for Louisiana referees, a nationally-known referee blog called Soccer Referee USA and another referee blog, famous in the south, called In The Opinion Of The Referee. The personal connections I already maintained with Louisiana referees attributed to it holding 55 percent of the total visits. Within the state, Baton Rouge (my "home-base" for refereeing) had the highest percentage of total visits with the Northshore and New Orleans areas following suit. Thanks to both of the other referee blogs, the site received visits from as far as California and New York, but most visits concentrated in the south. The implications of a high concentration in visitors from the south tells me that I should focus my topics on local and regional specific events, if at all possible, before attempting to expand to a broader national network.
Effective communication with a future niche audience will determine the success of my site. At the moment, 49 visitors returned to the website 4 or more times with an average of 13 total page views. Loyal following is an important factor to the website's brand and increasing such following can be achieved by writing more audience appropriate blog posts while tailoring my content for the technologies of the average viewer of my site.
Figure 5
Effective communication with a future niche audience will determine the success of my site. At the moment, 49 visitors returned to the website 4 or more times with an average of 13 total page views. Loyal following is an important factor to the website's brand and increasing such following can be achieved by writing more audience appropriate blog posts while tailoring my content for the technologies of the average viewer of my site.
Figure 5
The figure above shows that most visits come from desktops, with mobile visitors coming in close second. However, the average time spent on desktops was longer than time spent on the site while using a mobile device. My first priority when planning the site should therefore be making sure that it is compatible with desktop browsers. Even though the bounce rate on a mobile device is over 20 percent higher than a desktop, visitors on mobile devices cannot be ignored as they make up 33 percent of the total visits. Eighty-eight out of the 148 mobile and tablet visits received were from the Apple iPhone and 33 out of the 148 visits came from the Apple iPad, clearly making a case for me to check the visuals and logistics of the site on Apple products before publishing.
As of now, I still have an interest in keeping up my personal site. The advantages of sharing information and getting feedback, whether it be in person or through social media, outweighs the negative aspects of maintaining the site. Granted, with a busy schedule, it is not easy to keep up with blog posts; however, if planned ahead and kept to the topic of refereeing, the blog can continue to be updated regularly. It is empirically clear that the goal of the blog on my site should be centered on topics of refereeing. The site still serves as an area to post digital accomplishments and updated resume's, but writing on my experiences as a soccer referee will bring more traffic to my site, and hopefully expose my other talents to different networks of people as a result.
As of now, I still have an interest in keeping up my personal site. The advantages of sharing information and getting feedback, whether it be in person or through social media, outweighs the negative aspects of maintaining the site. Granted, with a busy schedule, it is not easy to keep up with blog posts; however, if planned ahead and kept to the topic of refereeing, the blog can continue to be updated regularly. It is empirically clear that the goal of the blog on my site should be centered on topics of refereeing. The site still serves as an area to post digital accomplishments and updated resume's, but writing on my experiences as a soccer referee will bring more traffic to my site, and hopefully expose my other talents to different networks of people as a result.