I mentioned here a while back that we were planning on redesigning the Web site and I solicited input on the direction we should take it n thanks for nothing, by the way.

Since you all opted to leave it up to me I guess we’ll be going all golf and beer all the time.

Seriously, we’re looking at lots of different things. Among them, ways to submit news tips and wedding and engagement information over the Web site in addition to expanded blogging opportunities.

We’re also going to doing some cosmetic work, working toward a cleaner look with more tidbit information on the front page. We hope to have it ready to go live in July.

In working on this, I’ve been looking at some statistics for our site. There’s some interesting information. For instance, year-to-date:

We have had 462,324 visitors

1,759,114 page views

4,337,323 hits

That translates per day to 3,082 visitors (many days are well over 4,000 but the bottom drops out on Saturdays, sinking to about 2,200), 11,727 page views and 28,915 hits.

The average visitor looks at four pages and registers 9.38 hits. He or she spends 5 minutes and 32 seconds on the site.

Pretty impressive, huh? With that in mind, I need to alert potential advertisers that with the redesign, we are going to open up some more opportunities (for a modest fee) to advertise, so be prepared for a phone call, or call me at 934-9611 to beat the rush).

As impressive as those numbers are, there’s more …

People seem to visit the site throughout the day. Some weirdoes are on there between midnight and 3 a.m. (That’s when we put the porn up) and then the traffic starts building. It peaks at about 6 a.m. and then steadily declines throughout the day. (Obviously as part of the redesign we will implement a midday update).

The bulk of visitors, close to 85 percent, are not referred to the site, meaning I assume that they type www.suffolknewsherald.com into their Web browser. After that, the next largest number, close to 4 percent, are referred to the site from hamptonroadsmedia.com, followed closely by google.com, geocities.com, myspace.com, yahoo.com and msn.com. Those using MSN average viewing 8 pages. The second highest is those with no referral who view 6.1 pages.

The top domain used by suffolknewsherald.com visitors is aol, followed closely by inktomisearch.com. Then, in order, are charter.com, verizon.net, Comcast.net, msn.com, cox.net, navy.mil, rr.com(?) and bellshout.net. At number 19 was statefarm.com, at 46 was sentara.com and at 50 was wachovia.com. While I appreciate the visits, you folks should probably be working instead of browsing the Internet.

.commers are by far the largest domain tree used by our visitors, followed by .net, .mil, .us, .edu, .gov, and .org. In 8th place, interestingly, is .de, which is Germany. In fact, we’ve had visitors from all over the world this year, including 62 from France, 52 from the United Arab Emirates (They are probably interested in providing security at Constance Wharf), 7 from Malaysia, 5 from the Czech Republic and r from Iceland. We even had 25 from Tuvalu, whatever in the hell that is.

Explorer is far and away the browser used by most of our visitors (Please go to mozilla.org and download Firefox 1.5, you Explorer users. It’s free and you’ll love it). Netscape is second, followed by a bunch of things I’ve never heard of with names like gigabot, ultraseek and Jakarta Commons HttpClient.

As far as what you are reading, or at least seeing, our site, the front page, naturally is first, accounting for 12.4 percent of the page views, obituaries is second. The editor’s blog is seventh, behind classifieds, news and the stupid popup, but surprisingly ahead of sports and the calendar.

I hope you find some of this semi-interesting as well. I love looking at this stuff. The one thing it doesn’t tell me though, is the actual names and home addresses of some of you blog here.

If you have some ideas, or know of some really cool newspaper Web sites you’d like to see us emulate in our design, please let me know. There’s still time to let us know what you want.

In the meantime, thanks for reading us, particularly you Tuvaluians.