Update on Site
by Ken Treybig, Webmaster

Since we're approaching the feast of Pentecost, I left the article "Why So Few?" by Carol Taylor up a little longer. It has been a while since we posted any kind of update on the revised UCG Singles site, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to do that now.

Demographics/Elist
In March 2008 we began the transition to the new site where everything on the site is still open to the public except for the Elist. Since we had so many complaints about people sending messages via the Elist when they were not part of United or any other Church of God group, we changed the process to require approval from the local UCG pastor to be on the Elist. Since completing the change, we have logged 219 email messages on the new system and currently have 157 people on the Elist--68 males and 89 females. The majority are from the USA, but we also have people from Australia, Barbados, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Trinidad & Tobago, and Zimbabwe.

Site Traffic
Our Website hosting service did a major upgrade on their system and in the transition they somehow turned off our statistic tracking software. I got it operational again in March, but we lost the data for January, February and most of March. April's data will give you a good example of the traffic on the site. Last month there were 1,083 visits with 675 unique visitors, and they did 6,866 page views. Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesdays are the days that typically see the most traffic. The largest number of visits are rather short--less than 2 minutes--but the next highest length is 5-15 minutes with 11.5% of our visitors spending that much time on the site. For those who have an iterest in browsers, the top browsers people use are Internet Explorer (67.3%), Netscape (13%), and Firefox (11.6%). In terms of how people get to the site, the top four search phrases are "ucg singles" (18.9%), "godly dating" (4.5%), "ucg singles memorial day weekend event" (3.6%), and "united church of god singles" (3.6%).

Feast Plans
Since registration is now complete for the 2009 Feast of Tabernacles, I thought I would check to see how many on the Elist have noted where they plan to attend. So far only 15 have listed where they will be for the Feast this fall--about 10% of the Elist. If you're on the Elist, I would encourage you to log in and update your profile to let others know where you'll be attending. Please also consider helping coordinate some activities at the Feast--where ever you will be attending. It's a great time to meet other singles at a variety of activities in a group setting. We have been asked to go to the Philippines. I know I'll be doing a lot of speaking there, but we're looking forward to the opportunity to meet many of our fellow church family members in that part of the world.

I hope you have a wonderful Pentecost.