Improvements to on-line information at www.lead.org.au

There were over 173,543 page-views of the massive amount of information on our website this year. There are now 1,415 files on-line including graphics, cgi, word, PDF, text, java, and javascript on the website. 48.15% of our web-page viewers (83,553 page-views) were from Australia and the remaining 51.85% (92,423 page-views) were from 159 other countries.

There has been a steady increase of web page-views throughout the FY 2004/05 compared to last year with 97,700 page-views in total. 51.6% of our web-page viewers (50,413 page-views) were from Australia and the remaining 48.4% from 143 other countries in FY 2003/04.

Accordingly, the number of web-page viewers from Australia has increased by 33,140 viewers (83,553 -50,413) and there have been 45,136 more web-page viewers (92,423-47,287) from other countries compared to the last FY.

Since the foundation of the LEAD Group and the implementation of the relating web-page including the advice service there had been web-page viewers from 176 countries seeking for information on www.lead.org. See Appendix 5 and 6 for the corresponding list of those countries.

The following chart shows the change in the number of page views over the past three years, unfortunately the free counter only goes to 20,002 per month, in April and May this year the counter stopped about five days before the end of the month so we would have had at least another 5,000 views for the period.

Table 5: Monthly Page Views Report Details

Figure 2: Monthly Page Views Report Details

In addition to Table 5, the graphic makes clear that the number of web-page views since its implementation in December 2002 has increased essentially each year and the period March to July 2005 shows approximately double the web-page views of the corresponding period in 2003.

¹The apparent decrease in August 2005 is due to the fact that there is only data available for the very first days of this month so far.

Our web-master David Ratcliffe made over 751 improvements to the site (see Appendix 7) including updating entries in 12 tables from our referrals database so that web-users can search out their own lead-trained painters, lead assessors, ceiling dust removalists, laboratories, lead spot test kit retailers, etc.

There was also an enormous enhancement of new and/or updated links on www.lead.org.au  this FY. See Appendix 8 which enumerates the particular links for the last FY and Appendix 9 for this FY.

Improvements to On-line Information in General

The web-master David Ratcliffe managed a regular registration with 97 search engines and registers including Google, Yahoo and Alta Vista. We have so far found at least 125 websites which contain a link to www.lead.org.au - see Appendix 10.  Another list in Appendix 10 follows from research with the search engine Google on 16 August 2005. It shows an example of the text around the link on some web-pages which are linked with www.lead.org.au.

Please see Appendix 11 ‘The LEAD Group site map 2005’ that summarizes all our achievements made so far on the web-page by our tireless volunteer webmaster David Ratcliffe.

 Increase of Information in the Database

Over 7,703 library information products are now data-entered including 1,640 with URLs. There are also over 4,490 useful referrals now entered in the database of which 2,088 referrals were made this year.