So, the transition from 2009 into 2010 was dressed in two jumpers and mittens as The Big Freeze hit the UK.

The snow which had made a white Christmas a fun-filled festive treat turned the return to work flicker between tedious and treacherous on the disruption scale.

There have already been posts about how council services and comms coped with the bad weather – there is a good round-up of those by Kev Campbell-Wright.

In the last week, since the weather started cheering the heck up, I’ve been having a look at our visitor stats for the period. Yes, we got more visitors than usual, to the relevant areas of the website (latest update, gritting and school closures pages) and lots of them were coming via our social media channels (mainly Twitter).

What was interesting to me, and something I hadn’t fully anticipated, was the devices which people were using to visit the website.

While a massive 97% was coming from computers ( 92% Windows OS; 4% Mac and 1 % Linux) not so much the volume of traffic but the diversity of devices making up the other 3% was slightly surprising and certainly a big change for us.

Smart phones made up lots of of the list – following in the next four places in the chart were iPhone, iPod, Symbian and Android. Further down the list with under a hundred visits from each are Sony OS, Blackberry, Playstation 3, Samsung, Nintendo Wii, Nokia, LG, Playstation Poratble and Sidekick.

Plenty of mobile phones of both the smart and, erm, not-so-smart phones. I expected this although the range and the percentage, while still small, was higher than we’re used to seeing.

I hadn’t anticipated the traffic from gaming systems (and the iPod). I’d like to know more about who these visitors are.

We’re reviewing the online response we made in the cold snap to see what we could improve on in preparation for a repeat (or some other situation) and delivering content and information in a way suitable for mobile and other devices will have to be a part of that.

Has anyone else looked at their visitor traffic by device / operating system?

Related posts:

1. Crisis comms online
2. Getting the conversation started

Tags: Android, games console, iPhone, IPod, Linux, Mobile phone, Nokia, Sony, Symbian

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 11:29 am and is filed under Content, Derbyshire County Council, Mobile, Social media, Website, online communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.