My counter tells me that a significant number of people have (with just two mouse clicks) made www.the-eversdens.co.uk their homepage. It also records how long visitors spend in the site. Some are in it for hours! I can track the pages they have visited and lots of other snippets of information – but not their names and addresses of course. Regulars are sometimes in for just a few seconds before they move off from their home page. They will just have time to catch any little temporary extra on the front page. Some visitors have returned to the site hundreds of times.

We have regular visitors from some seemingly unlikely places. Sunnyvale, California, figures strongly. Do you know who that will be? Many look at the visitors’ book but few leave an entry. It would be fun to know who our distant friends are.

I look at some of the professional websites and wonder how some things are done. I would like to be able to make the photographs of the village pan and zoom but haven’t mastered the technique yet. In any case, it would probably make the page too slow opening – that’s my excuse, anyway.

My plan is to change the picture on the opening page fairly regularly. The counter tells me that the screen size most common among our visitors is 1024 X 768 pixels so I have made the opening page fit that size in order to fill the screen. However, almost all the other pages (except two aerial photographs of the villages) are made to fit an 800 X 600 screen (I am told this is the correct thing to do). Download time is also important (although broadband is becoming more widespread) so the “Walk in the Eversdens” pictures, like those of local events, have to be fairly small and fairly low resolution. Isn’t it annoying how your pictures can look great full screen but quite ordinary when they are reduced in size?

I had the notion that I would renew the village pictures seasonally. It’s becoming a bit of a task to keep that section fresh. A gallery of village characters would be good but too fraught I fear! If you have a suitable set of pictures of the village I would be glad to try to use them – bearing in mind privacy and security issues.

Is it my server or do you find broadband to be temperamental some days? The temperamental days seem to be the ones I choose to publish a new set of pictures. A five minute job can take several hours on those days. I am relieved when such a day is a rainy one.

Omissions, errors, and glitches still occur. One or two helpful spotters keep me more or less in line. I have to be reminded from time to time that I manage the website (and the website doesn’t manage me) and I fret about it briefly when I am on holiday! (Sad, isn’t it?)

I hope you would give me (editor@the-eversdens.co.uk ) your suggestions for improvements – though I wouldn’t promise to have the skills to implement them. A children’s page has been suggested but so far no one has come forward with anything concrete. And it isn’t you: there is a knack for putting events on the calendar. When you need to know it, ask me!

Because the counter is free, it only gives me statistics on the last one hundred pageloads (upgraded to 500 in 2007. DF). So if I fail to keep track of it for a day or two I can easily miss visitors. However, since I last reported, we have been visited by people from all sorts of exotic places from Billericay, England, to Provdiv, Bulgaria. Here is the 2006 list of new visitors up to May. Does it ring any bells?