Lies, damned lies and statistics

One of the great things about WordPress, which hosts my blog, is that there is a whole page of statistics about how many people have visited. For example, I had 43 visitors yesterday, and the highest number so far was 88 (on 18 April). The most popular pages that people were browsing before visiting my blog, though, were just other pages on my website – which doesn't tell me much.

However, Matt, who very kindly hosts my website, has shown me a cool page I can view that tells me all about the visits to www.simonvarwell.co.uk – everything from their country of origin, to length of browses, and how they've come to my site, and I wouldnt't be surprised if I've missed a graph somewhere that lists the visitors by blood group.

So for example, I have discovered that…

• I've had 473 different individual visitors to my website this month;
• 13 April was the quietest day (17 visits), and 6 April the busiest (67 visits);
• Americans visited most, with Brits, Aussies and Germans next down the line
• the vast majority of visitors use Windows, but 7 visitors are on Linux (no, I don't understand either);
• only 49.5% of "hits" were through the Internet Explorer web browser, with Firefox not far behind on 36.4%;
• Of those who arrived after typing a phrase into a search engine, most were searching for my name, but two visitors each found my website after typing in "shetland horse" and "ismael kadare". Make of that what you will.

Most interesting, though, is what page people were looking at before visiting my website. Often it was pages I already know about who link to me, such as friends' blogs or websites. But there are a lot of Christian blogs, church websites, and emails, which make me think that a lot more people than I know about have been discussing and visiting this site, no doubt mostly due to the church search. Moreover, the website and blog have received surges in hits in the few days after I published some of the church reviews from round 1.

I am quite humbled that many people – both Christians and non-Christians – are reading what I write about in my search for a church. I guess I have a responsibility to God, myself and those churches I write about, to write honestly and to write in such a way that simply make people reflect more on God and his church.

And at the risk of sounding like a bit of a geek (though I confess I may be already beyond redemption in that department), I wonder whether the statistics will be influenced by how the church search resolves itself in the coming weeks.