Dear Sir or Madam,

Can you please tell me if any research has ever been conducted or
commissioned relating to the Council's web site? (For example, what
the public would like to see on it, how usable it is, etc.) This
should not include wide-ranging eternal studies that survey many
council sites at once, if not directly requested by the Council,
but solely research that the Council itself has carried out or
directly authorised. This should include any research carried out
amongst staff or council members, and even informal or ad hoc
research (such as collating comments made) should be included.

If any such research has been performed, I would request electronic
copies of any final reports and/or presentations produced, along
with details of when the report was produced, by whom, and at what
cost.

Yours faithfully,

Colin

Dear Mr Marshall

I refer to your request under the Freedom of Information Act for information on research conducted relating to the Council's website.

The Council ran a pop-up survey on its website during 2007 for a 12 month period to gauge users' views of the site.

The survey was produced by Social & Market Research, 3 Wellington Park, Belfast. The cost for running the survey for a 12 month period was £1,875 + VAT.

A copy of the report for 2007 is attached. The survey was not continued in 2008.

Yours sincerely

Stephanie Harte
Policy Development Officer

Dear Stephanie,

Thank you very much for this document: it is very interesting. I
have a few follow-up questions:

1) The results are based on a sample size of 146 users, who were
self-selected (i.e. agreed to fill in the pop-up survey). Do you
have figures for how many users were (a) presented with the pop-up
during the period but chose not to answer, and (b) how many started
to answer the survey, but never completed it?

If figure (a) is different from the number of visitors to the site
as a whole (i.e. if not every visitor was asked if they would
complete the questionnaire), can you also supply that figure, and
any details as to what the selection criteria were (e.g. was it
based on Geolocation, time of day, entirely random, etc?)

b) Can you clarify whether the website is/was created and/or
maintained in-house or by/with an external agency (and if external,
who).

c) If this survey has run continuously since 2003, I would assume
there are similar reports for those previous years. Could you
please supply the same information in relation to those.

Thanks,

Colin

Dear Colin

I have checked with our IT section who advise that the website
statistics only go back for one year. From 1st August 2007 to date we
have had 4416929 hits on our home page (Monthly average 401,539)but
unfortunately we cannot give any stats for the pop-up survey (i.e.
numbers who declined to take part or started the survey but never
completed) as it was hosted externally.

The website was originally created by Nevada Tele.com, which is no
longer in existence. The site is now maintained internally.

While we have run a pop-up survey on our website for several years, it
was only in 2007 that the survey focused on views on the website itself
- in previous years we were using it for views on our services generally
(e.g. refuse collection, street cleaning, parks).

Yours sincerely

Stephanie Harte
Policy Development Officer

email: [email address]

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Dear Stephanie,

Thanks for the clarifications. One final point: when you quote the
figures for "hits" on your homepage is that 'visitors' or
individual HTTP requests (i.e. each image and frame request etc
counts as an extra hit, so that each visitor actually generates
about 25 hits)?

If it is the latter, can you please supply the equivalent figures
for visitors?

Yours sincerely,

Colin

Dear Colin

Our IT section has confirmed that the figures previously supplied were
hits - the number of unique visitor sessions was 340822 (monthly average
30,983).

Yours sincerely

Stephanie Harte
Policy Development Officer

email: [email address]

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Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for this further clarification. I still need to come back
again though! The new figure supplied is for "unique visitor
sessions", but I'm unsure what that is. It seems to imply that a
user who visited the site every day would count multiple times in
the monthly stats, rather than just once. Is this correct? If so,
do you have the figure for unique visitors?

Thanks

Colin

Hi Stephanie,

Any joy in getting the clarification I asked for on this?

Thanks,

Colin

Dear Colin

Apologies for the delay.

Our IT section advises that our reporting tool states that "a session is
defined as one or more transactions between the Web Server and a
specific IP address. It tracks the number of different users that visit
your website every hour for every day, week, month or range of dates".
So, if that person was to come back the next day, they presume that
would be counted as a different session. Unfortunately, IT cannot
produce a report to show unique visitors.

I hope this helps.

Yours sincerely

Stephanie Harte
Policy Development Officer

email: [email address]

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