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2022 HOLIDAY
We're returned to Wales again, this time to the Brecon
Beacons National Park and climbed mountains such as Pen y Fan and rode
on the Brecon Mountain Railway. Also took in some industrial heritage,
and walked along canals. We're no longer adding new site sections
pending a review of this website's future.
12-01-23
Previous Year 2021
Sept 2021: We enjoyed a late-season self-catering
holiday (in glorious weather!) to Wiltshire visiting canals, stone
circles and various historic areas. No image pages though as
we've discontinued adding new galleries - see info
page.
 Our most recent holiday depicted on our website was
another visit to Snowdonia
in North Wales in June 2019, filling in some gaps from the previous
year's visit - so much to enjoy.
Check our tourist
related resources to our visits.
You can email us from here > >
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Site Usage
Please note - we're no longer posting an annual
report but we'll leave our last report here for reference.
2016 - report for 2015...
At the beginning of each new year we check our site's performance over
the previous year by analysing our Google Analytics website statistics
and ... the downward trend in visitor numbers of the last few years
continue. Now we identified the cause a while back - our by-now
dated site doesn't fit in well on mobile devices increasingly used over
the traditional desktop/laptop for web browsing. Google gives
most of our site pages a speed score of 96% for larger screens but only
63% for mobile, which translates into lower rankings on mobile device
searches - yes, we have a problem!
Under our website's hood we've improved things a little,
but without a modern responsive design we're somewhat snookered.
And bringing our site up-to-date with this would take one hell of A LOT
of work! For example, most of our gallery images - all carefully
optimised when created down the years - would need to be resized; and,
without getting too technical, there's things like configuring the
viewport, sizing tap targets, legible font sizes and close proximity
links - oh my! And apart from this there's social media
integration; at the very minimum we'd need a Facebook and Twitter
presence plus the ongoing time hit administering posts and tweets.
Now if this were a commercial site providing an income
stream we'd outsource the work. So do we spend a huge amount of
time on what is fundamentally a labour of love? Unfortunately the
answer is no, what with having to earn a living and other interests
there's no way we have the required time. So apart from some
ongoing tweaking here and there the site will stay as it is. We
still get some very respectable search rankings, yes, even on mobile
devices so it's not all doom and gloom!
Right, let's now take a quick look at site usage pattens
during 2015...
We added demographics reporting to the site analytics
early last year and see our peak audience age band is 35-44 of which
58% is male. The Chrome browser is most popular at 39%, with
Safari at 25%, IE 16% and Firefox 12%. 36% of visitors now access
from a mobile or tablet of which the Apple iPad accounts for 35% and
iPhone 21%; this is another year-on-year drop as Android grabs ever
more market share. Our top search queries include 'amazon world
isle of wight', 'york centre', then numerous PMR radio review
terms. Our most visited pages (apart from the home and image index pages) are: Duxford, Cotswolds, talkie walkie radios review,
tank museum
and Isle of Wight, much the
same pattern as in previous years. And to end on a heartening
note, visitors spend the time to read our pages judging from the avg.
time on page figures.
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