Update: Re-configuration of Preserved Stories website; upcoming launch of www.mchs2015.com

In a previous post, I’ve noted that our plan was to replace the website’s home page banner – the one that features the photo of Aquaview Condominiums in Toronto at Lake Shore Blvd. West and Forty Second Street as it appeared during early construction – with a banner for the MCHS 2015 Reunion.

We’ve made a change in the plans, in the work that Walden Design is implementing.

Rather than replacing the current banner, people who arrive at the site looking for information about the Malcolm Campbell High School 60s Reunion & Celebration of the 60s will be re-directed to www.mchs2015.com

The point of the exercise is to ensure – in response to feedback from people seeking information about the reunion – that the two sites are separate from each other.

Menu items

We’ve set up some Reunion-related menu items below the banner at the top of the page. These items will be moved over to the new site. What will remain, for now, at the Preserved Stories menu, across the top of the page, will be:

• Home
• Blog
• Contact Us
• MCHS 2015 Reunion

In time I may put back some of the additional menu items that were previously in place, arranged horizontally left to right below the banner.

Categories

The Categories listed in a vertical column at the left of the landing page currently include several items related to Malcolm Campbell High School. Those Categories will be positioned as separate pages at the MCHS 2015 website.

In the process, I’ve removed many of the Category items that were previously in place. I may keep things that way, or not; we’ll figure that out as we go.

Insights

From time to time I check at Google Analytics to see how many people are visiting the Preserved Stories website, and what pages are especially popular for people to read.

What I’ve learned is that many topics, that I imagined would not be appear to be of much interest to many people, are in fact of interest to many site visitors. I assume that people find their way to the posts as a result of Google searches, and perhaps as a result of the sharing of information among people looking for particular topics.

So, much to my interest, the following items are among the most visited sites at my website:

Beware of energy scammers going door to door

Erving Goffman began his graduate work in Chicago in 1945

Recently, a post from quite some time back has been getting more site visits than just about any post that I’ve written in recent years:

History of Regent Park

MCHS 2015 Reunion

Here's a hard top version of the Type-E Jaguar from the 1960s. Source: wallpeers.com

For people interested in the MCHS 2015 Reunion, it’s not surprising, I would say, that a post about a 1960s sports car is among the most widely read posts:

Ruth MacLeod recalls the day in the 1960s when a memorable Phys Ed teacher arrived at Malcolm Campbell High School in a Type E Jaguar sports car

Google searches

Overall, my sense is that having Categories at the Preserved Stories website is useful, but people find things to a large extent via Google searches.

I find the interactive element in all of this of much interest. The pages that are of particular interest to site visitors often include reports related to academic research. They don’t generally include anything to do with my own opinion about any topic. That underlines the fact, I think, that my particular strength, as a blogger, has to do with the adoption of  a reportorial function.

I’m also interested to note that the posts that are of much interest to a lot of readers aren’t as a rule very short ones. Some are under 1,000 words in length, and some can easily run well over 1,000 words in length, but I like to think they are packed with great information.