I have spent a few hours during the weekend doing some structural work on the site. It should be recognizable by a few cosmetic changes to the front page, including new pictograms for the different sections. More importantly, I have also added a fully navigable hierarchy of sections. With that you can, as computer professionals would say, drill-down to browse the available resources and locate the one you need. For example, by using links at the front page you can now simply select Media Library to see an overview of the available media sections, and then select, for example, Videos to access the video collection. It really is more complicated to describe than to use and indeed, I believe that this change should make the site (which now counts over 650 individual web pages) more accessible for first-time visitors.

A question which may occur is whether anyone is actually willing to browse that many pages . To be frank, most visitors don’t, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. The average visitor of the Spitfire Site viewed 4.6 pages during his/her stay during March, compared with a benchmark (measured by Google) of 3.5 which represents the average of other websites of similar size. Articles and photos seem to receive a healthy amount of hits from various Google searches, and keeping Google users to stay and see a few more pages than the first one they see (5.4 pages in average) is a very good sign indeed.

Some people are definitely attracted to browse through the site more thoroughly. Last week I was satisfied to see one of the longest visits yet documented in the statistics. The (anonymous) user found this site through a Google search, read the article he found, and then started exploring. His visit lasted 2 full hours; during that time he visited no less than 346 pages. Statistics like this make all the work worthwile.

Having mentioned Google, I was happy to see that Google now recognizes the complexity of this site by displaying a so-called site map to accompany the primary link to us – visual proof attached below. It’s a good sign. Less satisfactory is the fact that for searches on “spitfire” this site still appears a long way down the Google hit list. We’ll see if this can be improved. Say SEO.

Click on the image to enlarge