December's Attack of the Stats

I have just completed the WME Photo Audit for December, and its revealed a few interesting facts about WME as things currently stand.

There are currently 1,126 photos on WME. 779 of these are on the local WME galleries, with 347 on the WME1 testing zone. Taking into account The Rog Files and Dad Files collections, which are housed permanently on WME1 and contain 92 photos, I have 871 dedicated permanent WME photos leaving 255 test photos that I am still working on.

Looking at the local WME galleries in more detail, and the galleries seem quite well balanced in terms of photo content. My aim is to provide a fairly equal split between Bus, Rail, Canal and Local content, with the Metro discounted for the time being as I simply don't have the photos to consider this as a major feature of the site as yet.

I did a quick calculation to see what percentage of the 779 local gallery photos could be classed as Bus, Rail etc, fully expecting that buses would come out on top. Not so, Rail came in at 33% with Buses trailing at 26% and Local not far behind that. The stats hopefully disprove any notion that WME is mainly a bus site with a few extra bits thrown in. I was also surprised to find that Rail effectively supplies a third of all WME photos, helped no doubt by a big chunk of them being on WME Birmingham. I think its fair to say the site is quite balanced, and I was pleased that the Local photos made up a good proportion. Canals was left lagging behind a little, not helped by the fact that there aren't any canal photos at all on the Sandwell, Solihull, Telford or Worcestershire galleries.

Another calculation I was intrigued by was the average number of photos per collection. A lot of my recent work on WME has been about fleshing out what's already on the site, adding further photos to existing collections. There are 169 collections on the WME galleries, with WME Birmingham leading the way with a rail-dominated 41. This means the average came in at 4.6 photos per collection, a good start but something I want to improve on. Whilst doing the audit I noticed that there were still a lot of collections containing only the minimum 2 photos, balanced out by the bigger bus collections (Dudley by Bus is the biggest with 47 members). I really need to do something about the underdeveloped collections, and my current opinion is that the best way forward would be to use my newer photos to flesh things out rather than trying to extract more from the older archive. We'll see how it goes.

So thats a little summary for you, I do find these audits useful for checking how well the site is progressing and to flag up any areas of concern that might need addressing. I will probably feed back a little bit more with comments for the individual galleries themselves, besides which I need to knuckle down for a session of updating and rebuild a bit of momentum again in the process.