Jeff Beckham

In today’s Statesman, Sarah Coppola reports that City Council members Jennifer Kim and Brewster McCracken spent money to create “better” websites apart from their official city website pages. The in-house technology, they complained, didn’t meet their needs.

Coppola reports that the new sites drew grumpy responses from “the law department and city ethics officer, who recently asked them to remove content that had any hint of opinions or campaigning.”

However, the story included these notes:

• On average, Council Member Brewster McCracken’s official city Web page gets about 93 hits a day; his new site gets 10 to 35 hits a day.
• Council Member Jennifer Kim’s city site gets about 43 hits a day; she hasn’t tracked visits to her new site.

So McCracken spent $4,000 on his new site in December, which draws at most a third of the traffic of his city site. Kim says she hasn’t tracked visits to her new site. If you applied the same math to her site that you did to McCracken’s, she’d get about 4 to 13 hits a day.

At best, those are miniscule page view totals. I would have advised that McCracken and Kim use free software (like Wordpress) to put up a site; then apply Google Analytics (also free) to track users. They should update those sites regularly and begin an open dialogue with their constituents, and leave the city site worries behind.