Webmaster:
Mike Lampson
P.O. Box 471963
Charlotte, NC 28247-1963
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2005 Annual Board Meeting Committee Report
The web site continues and is updated regularly. I have been looking at various “portal” packages to improve management of the web site content.
Committee chairs may contact me for advice on setting up a web site or hosting it on the USStamps.org site. The Marginal Markings committee has recently set up a site that is linked (and indexed) through the USStamps.org site.
I am in the process of setting up databases for information that can be searched and displayed through the USStamps.org web site. Recently the Glossary was released in database form and additional efforts are underway. Other information may be put in an online database as time permits.
2003 Annual Board Meeting Committee Report
New to the web site this year is Rod Juell’s Glossary of Terms for the Collector of United States Stamps. The Glossary has been very popular with about 3500 visitors in its first nine months of operation. The entire USStamps.Org site receives about 1,000 distinct visitors per month with each visitor viewing an average of five web pages. As I write this report, I expect the home page visitor counter to pass the 40,000 mark prior to the Chicagopex meeting.
Our service provider, pair Networks, recently added the ability to use a database in conjunction with the web site. I hope to be able to implement new data-driven features on the site as time permits. The first feature that I plan to use the database will be the Glossary.
I continue my standing offer to other Committees and Study Groups to publish their own content on the site. Each Committee has its own page on the site which includes annual reports, links to other sites of interest and color images associated with articles published in The Specialist. Committee Chairs can contact me by e-mail for more information. All USSS members who wish to submit content to the web site should contact the appropriate Committee or Study Group chairs to sponsor their submissions.
2002 Annual Board Meeting Committee Report
Our web site has been maintaining the “status quo” for the last year and a half. I continue to add news and information from The Specialist monthly as forwarded to me by the Editor. I occasionally receive additional information from committee chairs to incorporate into the site. At this point the web site is serving its function – to be a promotional and recruitment tool for the Society.
The site continues to get a steady stream of visitors. The counter on the home page recently passed the 25,000 visitor mark just prior to the site’s 3rd anniversary on September 2nd. We are currently getting about 35 distinct visitors per day to the site and about 15 queries per day using the Search box option on the home page.
Our service provider, pair Networks, recently upgraded service to our account to give us the ability to implement some additional features on our web site. I will be evaluating these features over the next couple of months to see if I can use them to provide additional capabilities for the site.
I continue my standing offer to other Committees and Study Groups to publish their own content on the site. Committees and Study Groups can send me information to post, design their own HTML pages, or send a pointer to their own web site. Suggestions for content include: color pictures of items of study, indices or directories of articles and publications written by Committee members, tables or charts related to committee studies, etc.
2001 Annual Board Meeting Committee Report
The biggest news for the web site is that we submitted the site for evaluation in the annual FIP competition. It was awarded recognition as a 3-star site. The appropriate FIP competition logo is now displayed on the home page.
Content continues to be updated monthly, mainly from The Specialist. Committee reports and color pictures from NAPEX are available online. I’ve also found a free service to provide searching capabilities to the site. The search box is located on the home page.
Another service for the site is that we are listed in a “Stamps Top 50” list. Initially we ranked around 15th or so. Since then, we have fallen to the mid-30s. The ranking is updated daily. Use of the web site has not fallen, but rather, other more high-volume sites have added themselves to the list.
In the first 11 months of year 2000, we have had approximately 6000 distinct visits to the site, visiting 31,664 pages. The site has had success as a promotional tool for the society, though I do not have an exact count of the number of applications submitted using the application form located at the site.
I continue my standing offer to other Committees and Study Groups to publish their own content on the site. Committees and Study Groups can send me information to post, design their own HTML pages, or send a pointer to their own web site. Suggestions for content include: color pictures of items of study, indices or directories of articles and publications written by Committee members, tables or charts related to committee studies, etc.
2000 Annual Board Meeting Committee Report
The BIA/USSS web site was officially announced with the October issue of The United States Specialist. It came online with the basic pages for the following major subsections: The Specialist, News, Events, Application form, Research Papers and Publications. Since that time, it has been expanded to include the full 1999 annotated index of The Specialist, the Research Corner (including an online submission form), and some Study Group/Committee links and references.
Content is currently derived almost exclusively from The Specialist. Future enhancements will include a Members’ Links page and color versions of images from The Specialist. I hope that more general philatelic and/or historical articles from past issues of The Specialist can be included online along with more Committee and Study Group pages and possibly some online tools to assist collectors with stamp identification. Towards this last goal, I started prototyping a Washington-Franklin issue identifier, but currently there is lack the time to finish it.
Below are some statistics from the web site through May 23, 2000. What they show is a general upward trend in activity at the site along with three major “spurts” of activity: at introduction in October, at the first of the year, and after a recent article about the site was published in Linn’s in April. The major improvement at the first of the year was the addition of the 1999 Index of The Specialist and a change in the site layout and colors. There is no reliable way to determine how many visitors are one-time or repeat visitors. We do know that eight applications have been received this year that were printed from the web site. Of the 10 applications from last year, two or three are probably from the current site, with the rest applying from the old Dephi site.