The First Annivesary of the SVU Website

The New Website's Story actually begins on 19th August 2000, right after the SVU World Congress in Washington, DC. Mila Rechcigl, SVU President, mentioned a need of SVU's enhanced presence on the Internet in his e-mail to Jiri Eichler of Prague who had just returned from Washington. Since that day, Mila has exchanged one thousand and fifty e-mails with Jiri, of which 689 came from Mila with web postings, suggestions, corrections, and updates. By the end of the first week Jiri placed an experimental home page at a free address on mujweb.cz server. Content was being enlarged and both the authors focused on new website's structure to be created. New version was tested on a larger sever at geocities.com. In the beginning of October 2000, the home page already consisted of 71 pages in 5 categories: Headline News, SVU Organization and its Work (with already 13 subcategories and 16 active sections), SVU Calendar, and How to Become SVU Member.

A decision was made to put the new SVU Website on a rented virtual server maintained by professional provider around the clock, and to have proper SVU Internet-domain address registered. Quick action was taken -- search for the best deal, an order, a truly prompt cooperation with Frank Mucha the treasurer, and fast response from the provider. On Wednesday 25th October 2000, at 10:50 AM Prague time, the new SVU Website showed up at its registered address www.svu2000.org. After necessary tests it was publicly announced with its official birth date on 28th October 2000. It featured Jiri's summer photo of the Lincoln Memorial on the main page, Czech and Slovak national flags, SVU original logo, and a moving stripe with SVU Chapters locations across the photo. The website consisted of 10 main categories with numerous subcategories and approximately 260 pages. From the beginning, registration to major Internet search engines was in process.

During the first year of operation, SVU Website has been visited by more then seven thousand visitors, while the traffic is increasing continually. It provides not only a comprehensive and systematic library of SVU-related information. Thanks to extensive research work of Mila Rechcigl and Jiri's prompt technical solutions, the SVU2000.org domain has became an attractive source of information for general public interested in Czech and Slovak Issues, Genealogy, Czechoslovak America, Czechophilia, or Grants and Aid. It is registered in all major search engines, bringing more visitors who search for Czech and Slovak related sources. To date, the SVU Website has now over 400 pages in 148 active subcategories and sections under 19 main categories. Since January 2001, SVU Publications category contains electronic version of SVU News (Zpravy SVU) in PDF format, with an interactive table of contents in each issue.

Thanks to feedback from SVU members and friends, the authors have been successful in improving the website's user-friendliness. With the spring of 2001, the website was rebuilt in order to give every category and page their own addresses. At the end of May 2001, an internal search option was first tested, and soon, an effective Google search module was installed on SVU Website's main page. It provides a full-text search to visitors looking for a particular keyword through all pages of the SVU Website, including all issues of the electronic version of SVU News. This tool was followed by a standard dropdown menu providing fast direct links also to website's subcategories, and also a website map giving an outline of the content. To commemorate the first anniversary, SVU Website has been newly redesigned.

What the traffic statistics say? This summer's winner is definitely the SVU Conference in Nebraska. All pages related to this happening were on the top positions in traffic for three months. However, the most visitors now again request their No. 1 - Czechoslovak Genealogy Sites on the Internet. Also these three documents from SVU Information and Reference Series section belong to the top: Czech and Slovak Genealogy, Czech Societies in the US, and Czech Americans. Most recently, the popularity of the SVU Calendar is increasing and reaching top positions. Among categories, the top five are: SVU Calendar, Who Are We & What We Do, Czechoslovak America, Czech and Slovak Issues, and Other Links.

The peak time for visits is between 7 PM and 11 PM Prague time, which is 1 PM to 5 PM Eastern Time, and throughout the year, the traffic on weekends is lower than during weekdays. More than 40% of visitors come from the United States, and almost 20% from the Czech Republic. Frequent visitors come from Slovakia, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, UK, Australia, and recently also from Japan, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia. The SVU Website has also been repeatedly visited by people connected to the Internet from the following countries (order by number of visits): Hungary, Poland, Spain, Cyprus, Mexico, Belgium, Germany, Croatia, Estonia, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, Argentina, Sweden, France, Uruguay, Denmark, South Africa, Israel, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Philippines, Morocco, Norway, Portugal, Greece, Venezuela, Macedonia, United Arab Emirates, and Chile.

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