Grant Pitel
PELS Webmaster

Fellow members,

Since we officially launched the new PELS website in April, we continued site development. The primary goals in this effort were to communicate society activities more efficiently and to increase time visitors browse the site.

Communication with members was improved through creating an electronic newsletter and improving social network integration. The newsletter automatically creates excerpts of recent articles and emails them to both members and registered users. Email distribution will keep members aware of society activities while encouraging them to visit the website. The PELS Twitter Page was also recently created to provide yet another form of content distribution. Finally, a Share button was add to every article on the site, which enables visitors to share within their own social networks.

The amount of time visitors spend browsing depends heavily on the value of the hosted content. We recently received approval from Power Electronics Technology to act as a news syndicate. Our content management system automatically pulls articles from their site and lists them under Industry News on our home page. Syndication creates valuable content for our visitors, which should encourage them to stay on our site longer.

In closing, I wanted to provide the society with some statistics on the website to show that our efforts are paying off. Table 1 shows website traffic this month and compares it to traffic from one year ago. We hope that activity continues to increase and will help attract new members.

Table 1. Website Traffic Comparison in July: 2009 vs. 2010

Sincerely,
Grant Pitel