The website of the Town of Bruderheim

Ideas on what to do to attract more people that wish to live in Bruderheim

By Walter Schneider

Analysis of problems affecting the website operated by the Town of Bruderheim

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Overview of the principles of website popularity ranking
• A comparison of Web search returns
• Necessary editorial changes

Today's circumstances, dictated by the demands of the information age as it is commonly called, motivate  businesses, organizations, administrations, corporations, governments at all levels, and even members of the news media to construct and operate websites.  The Town of Bruderheim is no exception.  However, the website of the Town of Bruderheim is not a shining example of a good website — far from it.
   A good website can do a lot to promote a cause, an organization or an institution.  A bad website harms the image of an organization or institution.  It most likely will do more harm than good to a good cause.
   A website needs to be popular, user-friendly, easy to navigate, and — most importantly — it needs to contain useful, correct and up-to-date information.  In short, the contents of a website must serve to communicate news and information and must do so effectively.  If it does not do that, the effort and expense to construct, operate and maintain it are wasted.

An important aspect of making a website useful, user-friendly and popular is to use correct sentence structures, correct spelling and correct grammar.  More importantly yet, all statements contained in the website must fit logically, be correct and must relate well to one another and fit the scope of the subject or topic they should fall into.

Overview of the principles of website popularity ranking

Websites that have an appreciable popularity ranking will show up in the ratings available through alexa.com.  Alexa.com shows rankings, reach and average number of page views per visit for all websites in the world that rank about five-millionth or better in popularity.   Alexa.com shows the data pertaining to those aspects every day to many millions of people, and it shows how the data values for those aspects change over time, as far back as two years. 
   Fathers for Life sponsors the work and web space required to promote (via these web pages that you are presently reading) some ideas on what to do to attract more people that wish to live in Bruderheim.  At the time of writing this, the website of Fathers for Life ranked in 185,464th place of all websites in the world. 
   The website operated by the Town of Bruderheim does not show up at all in the statistics provided by alexa.com.  That indicates that the popularity ranking of that website is lower than about five-millionth of all websites in the world.  The website of the Town of Bruderheim shares that low popularity rank with millions of other unremarkable and unpopular websites.

A very low popularity ranking causes a number of consequences.  One of those consequences is that Internet search engines do not index those unpopular websites very thoroughly, if at all.  Moreover, if an unpopular website is even being indexed, when one does a search for specific search terms, the hits for that unpopular website will show up far down or at the very end of the search-return list provided by the search engine one uses to produce such a list.  Even more importantly, often an unpopular website provides no hits at all for searches on whom one would expect to find hits for specific search terms that the website contains.  That is bad for the image of the website and for the image of the organization and for the cause it represents or tries to promote.

A comparison of Web search returns

Rank in Search-Return List (as per google.com)
Search String	Total Search returns	http://bruderheim.ca	http://fathersforlife.org
Bruderheim	42,900	not in 1st 500 return entries	11th
"Town of Bruderheim"	165	38th	13th
"North Saskatchewan River" Bruderheim	122	50th	4th
"Elk Island Park" Bruderheim	43	no show	2nd
Agriculture Bruderheim	797	not in 1st 300 return entries	4th
Industry Bruderheim	5,840	28th	2nd
Welcome Bruderheim	26,200	8th	9th

Extremely few people will bother to look for entries in a search return list when the expected or hoped-for entry does not show up in the first 30 entries in a search-return list.  That is an important point to consider for meeting the objective of making a website popular.  As it is, on account of the Bruderheim web pages Ruth and I received a good number of telephone calls that we take make sure to redirect to the Town Office.  After all, Bruderheim needs all the public attention it can get, and if the Town's website can't make a good job of that, ours does.

I offered, in writing, the Town of Bruderheim my expertise (which is, quite plainly, considerable) with website design and made it clear that the offer is to provide that expertise free of charge.  Moreover, I offered free web space and free e-mail addresses and related services for all Internet communication requirements the Town of Bruderheim has.  In addition, I offered my services to act and work free of charge as the webmaster for the Town of Bruderheim.  All those offers have been ignored and were, ultimately, flatly refused by Kelly Rudyk, the present Town administration supervisor (official title: "Chief Administration Officer") in a one-on-one discussion after the June 1st, 2005 Town Council meeting.  More about that in the following pages. 

Although my offer still stands, my offer and Kelly Rudyk's refusal to accept it are not the main theme of the discussion of the shortcomings of the website operated by the Town of Bruderheim.  After discussing some of the flaws of the Town of Bruderheim's website I will return to the discussion with Kelly Rudyk in relation to my efforts in getting those flaws addressed and Kelly Rudyk's explanation why nothing is being done to make much-needed corrections to the web pages at the Town's website.

If I am asked for advice and help with making the website of the Town of Bruderheim more popular, I will provide that advice and help.  The principles to achieve better visibility on the Net are simple and involve nothing more than common sense.  Without employing those principles the Town's website will remain in the doldrums of the Internet and will never become the attraction to surfers that it should be.  That is a shame.  The Town of Bruderheim has much to offer.  It needs to promote what it has to offer, but the website does very little to further that goal.

Next Page: Necessary editorial changes

Back to index page for Impressions and Ideas on how to make Bruderheim even better

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Posted May 29, 2005
Updates:
2006 10 29 (reformated)