We’re very pleased to report that yesterday our museum’s website past the two hundred and fifty thousand page views since it was launched in February 2012!

Of course we’re excited in a geeky tech way but much more excited because it tells us a couple of things:

• First it means the website is definitely helping us meet our mandate to “to encourage the study of Canadian military history and in particular the history of The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, to rescue from oblivion the memories of its members, to obtain and preserve narratives in print, manuscript or otherwise of their travels, adventures, labours and observations, to secure and preserve objects illustrative of the civil, literary and military history of the Regiment, and to maintain a museum and a library.”
• Second it tells us that people are using the site for reference and research – some of our most visited pages for example, are the 3rd Battalion CEF WWI War Diaries, and the QOR WWI War Diaries – all of which have been transcribed and made available online.
• Lastly we know that the website has allowed us to connect with many relatives who have contacted us ask for or provide information about their ancestors, or – even more excitingly – to make donations of relevant artifacts because they have found us online.

A couple more interesting website statistics:

• Those 250,000 pages views were made by over 81,000 unique visitors to our site
• Those visitors came from over 156 countries and territories
• Our site currently consists of 338 pages
• 186 of those pages are biography profiles for individual QOR soldiers we’ve researched – and new pages are added regularly
• This post is our 173rd – roughly 5 blog posts made every 6 weeks
• We are constantly updating our timeline pages – there’s a lot of history to try to capture in 156 years!

I want to recognize the efforts of Mr. Joe Wyatt working on the timelines, Master Corporal Graham Humphrey on his WWII War Diary transcriptions and uniform posts, and Assistant Curator CWO (Ret) Shaun Kelly who has been recently helping to upload biography pages. It’s become very much a team effort!

So please look around the site, make sure you’re subscribed for email notifications for new blog posts, and let us know if there’s something you’d like to see included.  We’re even open to post guest blogs so let us know if you have something you’d like to share!!

Cheers and thanks for your support!

John
Curator