Blog review

Blog review.

Written for the Blog by a Preston resident

Well, it’s now a month since this Blog was started and to be honest we thought we would be talking to ourselves given the opinion of some people. Simply listing our views and thoughts on the Blog with very little interaction, how wrong we were! Although I remain the main contributor and we did not expect that to significantly change within the first 6 months, people still prefer to not ‘show their faces’ which I fully understand. If any resident would like to contribute with a posting or story of their personal experience with the council or just within the village we will give you a total guarantee that your identities will remain confidential and will never be released to any third party. If you would like to contribute please email us (email address on main page).

We are amazed at the response from people in our area and particularly from people in Preston. Readers have left very sensible comments, they have been relative to the subject in question and very searching (in my view). What does this tell us? My opinion is that it very clearly demonstrates Preston residents do care about their council and how it functions, they care about the services they receive and they are very interested in how Parish Councillors conduct themselves and act on our behalf.

Many emails (54 to date) have supported our efforts and wish us well, we have also had 2 emails from members of a certain group, along with a number offering us advice. We have received 1 abusive email the text of which I shall reproduce at the end of this posting but we will not identify the sender or the sender of any emails we receive, for obvious reasons.

Our audience is spread around the globe, including US, Taiwan, France, China, Germany, Poland, Malaysia and Russia. The ‘Hits” received from these counties represents less than 5% of the total and that is well within the range we expected. The vast majority of views were from within the UK, as would be expected, we are not satisfied that we are precisely hitting our primary target audience, which is Preston.

We had factored in a review of a number of areas, of which audience is one, initially on a monthly basis and that review is now taking place. Although we have not concluded that review and measured our successes and failures it looks increasingly apparent that Preston needs to remain our primary target and increased focus needs to be taken to ensure that happens, there are of course secondary targets we also need to hit as far as audience is concerned.

At the start of the Blog the browser and operating systems that connected to the Blog was a complete surprise to us and we weren’t quite sure why Macintosh and windows were so far apart (in the opposite direction to that expected) or why Safari was predominantly the connecting browser way above Internet Explorer CriOS and Chrome. As Page Views have increased the balance between the Systems and Browsers have leveled out and have come more or less within the rages that we had expected. Iphone connection was higher than expected but has now fallen within an expected range.

We have had 2440 page views to-date and that represents approximately 81 page views per day! For a novice Blogger we consider that to be a satisfactory position to be in at this particular point.

We would be equally satisfied with a much smaller ‘Total Page Views’ figure if we were consistently hitting our primary target of Preston.

It only remains for us to give our very sincere thanks to all those who have contributed, read the Blog, emailed us and posted comments, again thank you and please continue to contribute.

Listed below is the text of the abusive email received during the month.

‘I reckon your just out to cause trouble as usual and you have no right to be knocking our council if I had my way I’d give you a *****, so leave it alone.’

I think this person has lost the argument, he obviously supports the council which in itself is not a bad thing. However he could have made his argument in a different way, we would have been pleased to publish it and respond.