In the 'Net
Andrea Thrussell - Plymouth Argyle, Saturday 12th December 1998
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The U's Net web site passed a major milestone earlier this week when it received its 100,000th visitor. I added a 'counter' to the site in June 1996 and since visitor number 20,000 it has become a custom to record the name of every 10,000th visitor on the front page. The popularity of U's Net has increased drastically in the last year, as more and more people get Internet access at work, college or home, and whilst it took four months for the counter to move from 20,000 to 30,000, the jump from 90,000 to 100,000 took just three weeks!
Although web page counters are not a completely accurate way of recording the number of visits to a web site, I also get log files every day that tell me how many times every page and image in the site have been viewed. This is a useful and reliable way of telling which are the most popular features of the site and the opinion polls always rank highly. The site recently hosted a survey for the club about the Clubcall service which had produced nearly 100 responses as I write, while the most recent poll was for Internet fans to choose their Player of the Month for November. The runaway winner was John Taylor who received nearly half of the votes after scoring two vital goals last month, including the vital equaliser against Darlington and setting up the own goal winner of that game. Runner-up for the fourth successive month was Alex Russell and Andy Duncan was third. When I add the results to the poll archives I always include a selection of the comments made by the supporters about their chosen player. One voter said about John Taylor: "Is he defying science and getting younger?". Another commented: "Others have been as valuable and worked as hard, but I feel Shaggy deserves it for his remarkable goalscoring record. The man is a United legend." On the subject of the goalscoring record, the United player-coach has equalled Alan Biley's record of 81 goals in all competitions and thanks to Mark Johnson I was able to include a list of the top eight goalscorers on the site last week. Colin Faiers produces these figures and he has kindly offered to supply U's Net with copies of the statistical reports he produces for the Club on a regular basis, joining the group of fans who contribute to the site and write articles or reports. A busy part of the site that I have written about before is the message board, an open-to-all forum where debates can be started and added to at any time by fans anywhere in the world. In recent weeks there have been discussions about the size and depth of the squad and concerns that injuries and suspensions may damage our promotion hopes, complaints about the price of the replica shirts, requests for directions to away grounds and, since Saturday evening, a lot of gloating from Posh fans about last Saturday's result. Proof - as if any were needed - that the average 'Boro fan comes from a different planet came this week when some of them tried to argue that they out-performed us in the FA Cup this season. If you recall, they were knocked out in the first round by Wrexham so if you can work that one out send answers on a postcard please! Andrea Thrussell |