I know, I know, any device with a browser can see our website, but on the 6th June 2010 we were visited by someone using an iPad, for the first time!
More importantly we achieved our highest website stats ever last month with over 1,058 absolute unique visitors making over 4,080 visits and 20,810 pageviews!!! That’s a hell of a lot of BCC love being spread…
Hello
Due to a change to the way we will be operating the forum, and the fact that the change requires a lot of technical jiggery pokery we’re not in a position to accept year three memberships just yet.
So, despite the fact that your membership cards expired about an hour ago, the club will grant an extension to the year 2 memberships until we can begin accepting year three applications.
If you’re already a year 2 member then please continue to use the allotment and other club benefits as usual. Those who are not, don’t worry, we’ll have it sorted before you can say…”so what’s a TickerTape anyways?”
We’re aiming to have all this in place for Tuesday the 6th April 2010 but will have to update you when we know a little more.
Thanks for your patience
We’re moving to a custom BCC forum, on the BCC website, so will soon stop using the southerndownhill.com club forum.
The move to the new forum will include a period of about a month where we have both, for handover purposes. You will be given new usernames and passwords for the BCC website and Forum when you join up for year three.
Rob Lewis (southerndownhill.com) has been incredibly helpful and generous in providing the club with both forum space and website hosting since we started back in 2008. We’re making this move for a number of reasons, all of which will benefit the club, but (and this is important) this is not being done because we don’t want to be a part of SDH or because they don’t want to have us.
We need to provide a forum that is more club focused, in terms of it’s functionality, ease of use, and visibility from our website. The SDH forum is in many ways better than our BCC forum, but it’s just not quite right for the current and future needs of the club.
The new BCC forum will be part of the BCC website, it’ll also be very simple. This is something that has caused problems amongst many members who’ve struggled to find their way onto the current forum – while not actually very hard, it could be easier. This is important as people who are active on the club forum are the ones who are most active within the club. Of course this is a case of chicken and egg, but it’s clear that by making the forum easier to use, more people will use it and then more people will get involved in club activities.
The new forum will display some threads to the public so that people can see what’s going on… other threads will be only visible to members once logged in, meaning that we can retain the private nature of the club forum too. As part of this change we will be able to provide ‘members only’ website content aswel, meaning that we can have areas for people to upload route maps, see club resources resources etc etc…
In addition the change will enable us to conform to online Child Protection best practice more easily, something that really is very important especially as we are growing in numbers.
So a valuable change all round…but…
All that aside, I’d like to say a special thank you to Rob Lewis for all his help, it’s probable that we would never have even existed at all if it wasn’t for the fact that some of the original Longleat riders first met on the SDH forum, and then were able to use it when setting up the club. I hope that many of you stay active members of SDH, I know I will.
In light of a few recent misunderstandings we’ve made sure that the club rules and constitution are both clearly displayed on our website. So, if you haven’t already, please have a little read… it’s mostly common sense but as with any sports club both documents are important and must be adhered to. Thanks
https://www.blackcanoncollective.co.uk/about/rules-and-constitution/
It seems that the images on our website are being attacked by some Events Calendar gremlins. We’re trying to sort it out but can’t get hold if Gizmo…
Update: Now fixed. – Al.
This here website, that you are reading this here post on, is all about the BCC. Its about what we do, why we do it, how we do it, when we do it and who’s doing it. When you stop to think about that, and consider we now have over 90 members, that’s a lot of stuff to keep up to date and easy to find.
As part of the autumn committee projects, I’ve picked up the website baton (that had been hiding under my desk) and shall be trying to improve not just the website, but how we communicate with our members as a whole, and indeed, how they communicate with us.
We need to make sure we are communicating beyond our existing members too. Potential members and other interested parties are important website users too.
So, all that said, there are a few things we know we need to do…
.. and indeed there may be more. Which is where you come in. What do you think we could do better? Is there anything we don’t do you think we should? Are there things we do do that we shouldn’t? Would you rather the website was purple and yellow? Please let us know! 🙂
There is a forum thread for members to comment in here, you can also comment directly below and/or anyone is welcome to send an email to suggestion.box@blackcanoncollective.co.uk. We promise not to take anything personally, so please, be honest.
And no, I wasn’t serious about the purple and yellow…
Now I might have left this a bit too late, but… I hope to put together a 2010 Black Canon Collective Calendar which will be ready in time for Christmas! The calendar will be sold for a reasonable sum to raise funds for some of the projects which we are working on (skills area and Groovy Blue trail). Now we are dealing with a very short time scale and I need pictures FAST! I want the calendar to show all the different aspects of bike riding (XC, DH, Velodrome, cobble wobble) digging, racing or general ride related faffing that BCC members get themselves into. The only rule is that the photo must be of a BCC member and it must be of sufficient quality to be printed on A5, but the rest is up to you. To have any hope of this project working, I need YOU to get all your best photos and upload them onto the Black Canon Collective Flickr account before Sunday 15th November.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/blackcanoncollective/pool/
A select panel of judges will then select the finest 12 photos for the Calendar.
If you have any questions please e mail me on simon.truelove@blackcanoncollective.co.uk
Ta
Simon
Over the next 4 days each of the committee members will be updating this blog with info of projects they’re working on, giving info of how to get involved, and what to expect over the next few weeks.
Check back soon to see what they’ve got to say.
That’s not actually true. In fact it’s all about the content, but for this post …
Since launching in May 2008 , this site has had 18,788 visits.
19.56% have been new visits.
Even if we assume that most people use 2 computers, that’s 1830 people.
iPhone OS is our third most popular OS, with Mac’s second and then Windows first. Interestingly iPhones make up more unique visits than all the other phone OS’s combined.
75 visits came from a dial up connection, 9616 from DSL.
117 visits have come from twitter.com , 123 from britishcycling.co.uk and 3164 from Southerndownhill.com.
Visitors have come from 54 countries, including Slovakia, Iceland, Nigeria and Iraq!
Our Icelandic friend looked at 13 pages and spent 34:04 mins doing so.
Searching for “chris smith black canon collective” generated 686 visits between 28th September 2008 and 28th March 2009. Interestingly not a single one of these visitors was new. Perhaps it was all Chris?!?
Our most viewed news post has been “Tick Tock” (the first TickerTape write up) with 289 views.
8:00pm is when we’re busiest, with over 4467 views made at this time.
On Friday, September 18, 2009 – 184 visits were made, our highest count so far. 114 new people visited the site that day (we published the cobble wobble results the day before).
We’ re working on making the site better; simpler and easier to navigate. Making sure that new content is visible on the front page will help too, as lets be honest most of us have a very short attention span (over 64% of visits last less than 1 minute).
Importantly though people are returning to our site, and that’s great news!
We’ve finally got round to adding some of the content and functionality we promised when we launched this website.
We promised to enable members to make video and photo contributions to the site. We toyed with different ways of doing this and decided that creating a BCC ‘group’ on a media hosting site then embedding a media stream such as a slide show (or similar) was the best solution. This would allow users to add media without having to have access to the website itself, as any new media would only be added to the ‘group’ which would automatically be included in the embedded media stream. Gravy.
However we couldn’t find a provider of video and photo hosting that was good at both so we went with the best at each; Vimeo and Flickr.
We now have a photo page, with embedded Flickr slideshow, that members can add to, see http://www.flickr.com/groups/blackcanoncollective.
We also have a video equivalent that uses vimeo, see: http://www.vimeo.com/groups/blackcanoncollective. This doesn’t currently have any content but as soon as it does it’ll be embedded on the videos page.
We promised to enable members to create blog entries on the site; this is being trialed (not the members but how we do it) and will be a great addition to the site showing many more dimensions than I have been able to with my own scrawlings.
We’re also going to be changing the format of the welcome page so that the latest news / blog entries are displayed more prominently, this will ensure that content isn’t missed and the page stays fresh.
We’re always looking to improve so will be glad of any feedback you may have on this or anything else.
We’ve now got a page devoted to our supporters, so please have a look and visit their websites.