Over the past month we have regularly discussed what to do with Ballina info and have come to the conclusion that we need to turn it into a viable business model which will allow us to reinvest our time and resources into making it a much more feature and content rich experience.

To give you a bit of an idea of how the site is performing I thought I would throw together some quick numbers on traffic to date this year.  All the statistical information comes from Google analytics, which is a must have tool for any website owner.

Overall statistics between January 2008 and October 7, 2008
Visitors: 114,376
Page views: 411,178
Pages/Visit: 3.59

Busiest Day:
1,338 on April 8, 2008 (fatal shark attack in Ballina)

Most popular content:
Accommodation (117,607 page views)
Cinema (97,601 page views)
Business Directory (93,607 page views)
Blog (37,407 page views)
Real Estate (11,691 page views)

Blog statistics
1389 posts, 233 comments
Most discussed article: St Helena Speed Camera

Accommodation Verified Online Bookings
$44,441.60 of confirmed bookings for local providers

As you can see the site is performing very nicely, even though somewhat neglected. In the coming weeks we will be putting together a post and a survey to determine what areas of Ballina Info you would like us to work on, in the meantime feel free to leave your comments below.

At the bottom of the right hand menu there is an “Email Notification” form to fill out.

Enter your email address and you will be sent a notification every time we post something new. Now you will never miss any of our great articles.

 If you would like to see how this works just click on the image below:

if you would like to put this on your site there’s a really tiny code snippet that will take about five minutes to cut/paste/upload .

We hope that this will provide the Ballina community an online voice, and we look forward to bringing you all types of different local information, as well as things that going on with the Ballina info web site. 

Firstly we would also like to welcome Barry Cheadle to the Ballina info team as a blog and article writer.  I know that I am looking forward to reading upcoming articles and posts from Barry, who has become one of areas leading journalists.  Many of you may already know Barry from his years of dedicated service to the Northern Star and as editor of the Koori Mail.

If anybody else is interested in becoming a blog writer we encourage you to contact us and let us know what topics you would like to keep the community informed about. We are open to pretty much anything!

We also encourage you to take an active role in helping us build this blog, by posting comments to anything that you find interesting.  The Internet is much more interactive medium than traditional print media, in that the community can build their own interesting perspective to any news items.

Once again thank you for dropping by, we hope to see you again soon. 

This is where all the info on this site will be posted.

Feel free to leave a comment from time to time…