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Recollections of BBC engineering from 1922 to 1997
The British Broadcasting Corporation
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Web Site Design and Statistics

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Web site design

Here are some random notes of my thoughts about the design.
 

January 2008.......

New: I use Microsoft FrontPage 2002 to build this website and I have decided to continue doing so for another year or so. FrontPage has been discontinued and superseded by Microsoft's Expression Web which I have now tried. It is clearly a very good application but I suspect that the next version might be more suitable for me. In particular it lacks support for building a navigation structure that can generate menus automatically. Third party code is available for doing this but I would rather wait in the hope that the facility will eventually be integrated.

When I started producing this web site I read that Tables should be used for layout and I have used this technique on most pages.  However tables are now out of fashion and Cascaded Style Sheets (CCS) should be used for layout.  I have tried this method using a trial version of Expression Web, guided by this book, and it's certainly a plausible alternative but the conversion would take a long time on this web site. Therefore I am hoping (probably in vein) that the next version of Expression Web will have facilities to make this easier. In the meantime I plan to make gradual changes using FrontPage, so that the web site is not so table-intensive by the time I stop using FrontPage.

It has long been known that FrontPage produces inefficient code and I have made matters worse by using tables and being lax in my use of Styles (although I do use External Style Sheets).  Nearly every page fails W3C validation!  Fortunately I don't think that this has had a serious effect on download times and browser compatibility because most of the displayed pages are fairly simple. Expression Web does have a facility for removing formatting and it has several ways of highlighting problems with the code, but all this processing takes time! So, I'm also hoping that the next version of Expression web (or equivalent) might include tools to speed up this process.

There are several other web editors out there ranging from Notepad to Dreamweaver and I might come across something more suitable than Expression Web (which is for professional web designers), but as it succeeds FrontPage I think that it probably offers the best migration path. I have tried Serif's Web Plus but although this seems very good when starting from scratch it doesn't seem to like starting with code generated by FrontPage,

Sorry, I know that this is a cop-out, for now at least, but I am not a professional web site designer - and I do have a life!

New: Click here for 2007 statistics.

April 2007......

A link to a large pdf file on this website appeared on a discussion forum web site at the start of April and by 6 April the bandwidth allowance for BBCeng was exceeded.  I needed to take swift action to keep BBCeng operational, so I removed a number of large files and made the necessary arrangements with the web hosting company.  I would like to avoid a recurrence and so I plan to consider various options.  I would welcome relevant advice.

Early 2007......

In December 2006 I upgraded the webspace  from 500MB to 1GB.

I used to make some links open automatically in a new window, but I have since read that it is better to let the user decide whether to do this (e.g. by right clicking).  Tabbed browsing makes this even more appropriate.  So, I am gradually amending the links on BBCeng so that they do not automatically open in a new window or tab.

 

Early 2006......

Web generation software:  I have been using computers since 1970 and even made a few in the 'old days', but I am not very interested in programming languages and prefer to use applications.  On the other hand I don't want to spend ages learning how to use a very complex application.  So, I have not written this web site in HTML and I have not made it using Dreamweaver.  Instead I have used Microsoft FrontPage 2002.  I am well aware that FrontPage has its limitations and that many web designers prefer other approaches (probably including some of my ex-BBC colleagues!) but it suits me and I think that it is well matched to this particular task.

Redirection:  The earlier web sites were hosted on server space that comes with my broadband ISP service (www.ntlworld.com) and I used www.ukreg.com to redirect from www.onairbook.co.uk and www.bbcdd.org.uk.  This was not ideal because if I redirected in a frame the frame address remained on the browser's address display irrespective of the sub page selected, which made it difficult to link directly to a specific sub page (e.g. in an email).  Alternatively, if I redirected without a frame the browser showed my ISP address.  Perhaps it doesn't really matter for a web site such as this, but I was not very happy about it.

Hosting:  When I was sent a large number of EDI sheets occupying about 200MB I decided that, rather than just including a few samples, it would be much better to include them all.  Furthermore, as I wanted to learn about the additional facilities provided by a proper web hosting service, this gave me the excuse that I needed to use the Basic Website Hosting provided by http://www.freevirtualservers.com/hosting.htm.  I looked at other providers and decided that this one was the best match in terms of space (300MB), facilities (e.g. FrontPage Extensions) and cost.

Backup:  I am happy to pay for the hosting service, at least for a few years.  When it has developed to a suitable stage I plan to send it on disc to BBC Heritage and BBC Written Archives, because I hope it will become a worthwhile record of BBC engineering history.  If in the meantime if I "fall under a bus" arrangements are in hand for someone else to take it over.

Database:  The use of a spreadsheet or a basic list of links is probably not the best way to give access to the EDI sheets and eventually I might set up a different system using a database.
 

Statistics for 2007

This table seems to indicate that access to the web site compares well with 2006 (see below).  The high bandwidth is mainly due to videos being downloaded (they have now been removed to YouTube).

The bandwidth statistics don't tally with the figures provided by the server.  For instance the server figure for November was about 9.6 GB compared with 7.6GB in the table below.  I don't know why this is.

Month Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
Jan 2007 1543 2409 8706 83725 2.20 GB
Feb 2007 1059 1523 8862 51557 2.03 GB
Mar 2007 1418 2444 11568 71180 2.09 GB
Apr 2007 1504 2339 8395 54850 3.20 GB
May 2007 1144 1862 8110 43552 1.00 GB
Jun 2007 1251 1870 7889 47186 744.43 MB
Jul 2007 1437 1891 5929 39681 683.86 MB
Aug 2007 1461 2221 7331 46505 771.21 MB
Sep 2007 1792 3020 12226 80583 1.84 GB
Oct 2007 1916 3331 12414 92274 4.28 GB
Nov 2007 1920 3034 10364 72416 7.60 GB
Dec 2007 2097 3291 10437 70135 2.05 GB
Total 18542 29235 112231 753644 28.45 GB

The Visits Duration table shows a reduction compared with 2006.  I think that this is because quite a lot of visitors explored the site in 2006 and now they return to see new additions only.

Visits duration  
Number of visits: 3291 - Average: 249 s Number of visits Percent
0s-30s 2364 71.8 %
30s-2mn 259 7.8 %
2mn-5mn 160 4.8 %
5mn-15mn 247 7.5 %
15mn-30mn 116 3.5 %
30mn-1h 103 3.1 %
1h+ 42 1.2 %

Statistics for 2006

Some visitors to BBCeng might be interested to see these statistics for the first year of operation:

Month Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
Jan 2006 274 520 8315 26520 1.26 GB
Feb 2006 490 793 7011 22442 866.91 MB
Mar 2006 554 935 7966 32761 300.55 MB
Apr 2006 80 94 2828 6615 302.24 MB
May 2006 524 840 6844 37157 854.91 MB
Jun 2006 673 1029 5668 33191 703.09 MB
Jul 2006 705 1022 4269 22595 860.42 MB
Aug 2006 666 1084 6026 30378 1.31 GB
Sep 2006 523 839 3730 24099 585.65 MB
Oct 2006 709 1029 4789 34091 1.26 GB
Nov 2006 737 1234 6245 37283 667.74 MB
Dec 2006 1263 2055 8765 67759 1.74 GB
Total 7198 11474 72456 374891 10.60 GB

The figures need to be interpreted with care because many of the visits were very short as shown below:
(The figures for April are not valid because there was a fault on the server.)

Visits duration  
Number of visits: 11474 - Average: 336 s Number of visits Percent
0s-30s 7169 62.4 %
30s-2mn 1185 10.3 %
2mn-5mn 832 7.2 %
5mn-15mn 1044 9 %
15mn-30mn 544 4.7 %
30mn-1h 430 3.7 %
1h+ 269 2.3 %
Unknown 1 0 %

However this still leaves a significant number of non-accidental visitors and demonstrates a lot of support for the web site (given that it is very specialised).  About 50 people have made contact by email in the last year, so this is also very encouraging.  

Here are two specific, and recent, examples:  50 Years of Woofferton and Droitwich Calling were viewed 221 and 327 times respectively in December 2006.

Thank you to all contributors and all visitors.

Happy New Year
Martin Ellen