Merry Christmas to all players, officials and supporters of Presteigne St Andrews FC – here’s hoping that we all have a good one and a happy and prosperous 2012.
Ok, so ‘prosperous’ could be overdoing it a bit, but let’s hope we can at least keep our heads above water both on and off the field!
It is a purely by coincidence, rather than any superb planning on my part, that this is the 1,000th post I have put up since the website was first launched in August 2009 – and that is just on the home page, never mind the match reports and results and other pages!
It would seem an opportune moment to thank all the managers and other club officials for their support during that period – I couldn’t keep the thing updated anywhere near as regularly were it not for their cooperation.
In particular, I would like to thank Paula Randell for her unstinting support in supplying photographs for the website – despite my seemingly endless pleas for piccies, Paula is generally the only one to respond, although I am also indebted to Dot Griffiths and Pie, among a select few others.
A welcome addition in more recent times has been the volume of Junior Football reports that have been landing in the Inbox – it is good to be able to report on the successes of the younger players, so to those coaches and managers, please keep the report coming in 2012.
A few other figures regarding the website in which you might be interested – but only if you really are that fed up with wrapping Christmas presents and have finally got to the point where you really do think: ‘Stuff the turkey!’
It is generally accepted in website circles that the number of ‘visits’ rather than ‘hits’ is the best guide as to how many people actually access the site.
Since we started in August 2009, we have had 102,940 visits to the site – amazing, really for a small club in Mid Wales.
Despite a ‘disappointing’ season so far for both senior teams, we actually recorded a record number of visits in a month in August of this year when 4,976 visitors dropped by.
As you might imagine, the vast majority of visitors are from the UK – taking this month as an example, 85% of our visits were from this country, but the United States has also shown up well with 340 visits representing almost 10% of our traffic so far for December.
The Russian Federation, Ukraine and Germany also drop by pretty regularly, while we have had 14 visits from Japan. Even allowing for some of these being ‘spam’ (and I don’t mean Andy Hammersley!), people from more than 20 countries have taken a look in this month alone.
1,000 up then, and here’s to the next thousand – hopefully beginning with flowing prose on a win over Knighton Town on Boxing Day – if the first-team squad could sort that out I would be very grateful.