Ride statistics on the website are current through the end of July.

You can see the most current information on the website, both under the "RideStats" menu item and under "myRides".  

In the course of doing this month's statistics we found a few members who had duplicate member IDs.  Usually this happened when an individual member became part of a household membership, or a member let their membership lapse, and was assigned a new number when they rejoined the club.  Haggith, Carol, and I believe we have found all these problems and corrected them, but please take a look at your rides and make sure that you are getting credit for all the rides you participated in.  If not, contact Carol or Leon and we will do our best to work it out. 

Put Your HBC Membership on "Automatic"

In June I found out that my membership had lapsed for a about a week.  It turned out that I had never received the emails reminding me to renew my membership.  As a matter of fact, due to a software glitch we weren't sending reminder notices to household memberships.  The only way I noticed my lapsed membership was by logging into the website and noticing a small box in the corner mentioning my lapsed status.  

Recent changes in our membership software, Wild Apricot, have allowed us to offer memberships that renew automatically.  When your membership comes up for renewal, you will receive an email indicating that your membership is about to expire. When you renew your membership, you may choose either a Household or Regular membership that will renew automatically in the future.  If you choose this option, you will never have to worry about forgetting to renew your membership again.  If like me, you hope to be an HBC member for many years, it makes sense to have your membership just renew automatically. You must use PayPal to have a membership that renews automatically.  

Some Website Statistics

I recently added some code to our website to enable some reporting to Google Analytics.  Google Analytics can track traffic to our website, and give us some information about how many people are viewing the website, how long they are staying at the website, which pages they are viewing, and which platforms they are using to view the website.  We have only been doing this for about the past three weeks, but still some interesting information is becoming apparent:

• We get somewhere between 50 and 100 visits per day, with the highest volume days on weekends -- maybe folks looking for a weekend ride?  This includes a small number of visits coming from Russia, China, Germany, the UK and other foreign lands.  
  
• When visitors come to our site, they view an average of 4.5 pages, and spend about 3 minutes on the site.  The most frequently viewed page is the "home" page.  Next most frequently viewed is the ride calendar, and the third most viewed page is the Ride Etiquette. About 25% of our visitors only view one page.  
  
• About 25% of our visits come from someone using either a tablet or a smart phone.  Wild Apricot provides several themes that we can use as a basis for the website.  Our current theme is not particularly mobile friendly.  But in the near future John Zeiss and I are going to talk about converting the website to use a theme that is more friendly to mobile devices.