Aggie Horticulture Impact Statement 2005

Aggie Horticulture Impact Statement, 2005
26 November, 2005

Aggie Horticulture, the Web server of the Texas Horticulture Program, surpassed another remarkable milestone in April, 2005. It served over 20,000,000 files for the month of April alone! The actual number was 21,530,816, and that computed to 1,021,147 user sessions. That's a lot of people coming to get our educational information. In calendar year 2005, we delivered 186,149,395 million hits which computed to 10,723,278 user sessions. After just over 10 years of continuous service, our Web activity has more than doubled every 2 years.

Another estimate of the impact of Aggie Horticulture can be obtained by comparing the number of other Web sites that link to us. Using the free service LinkPopularity.com, we compared our link report to those of peer Web sites including the highly regarded Ohio State University horticulture site, the American Society for Horticultural Science Web site, and a commercial site, NeilSperry.com. Table 1 summarizes those findings:

Our Web site continues to stand as one of the most popular Web sites in the world providing horticultural information as reflected by the degree to which others link to our content.

Texas Cooperative Extension has implemented a new system for tracking and reporting the extent to which the Web provides information to its clients. Webmasters in the various departmental programs report log summary statistics monthly to the TCE Web Site Statistics database. Data reported are the page views, the number of unique hosts who visit the site, and the total throughput of data (MB of files served). Currently, 24 servers are represented in the database. When a summary report was obtained for the calendar year to date, it was determined that Aggie Horticulture had served over 46 million pages, to over 5 million unique hosts, representing 4.7 million MB of total data. (Note that the unique hosts is lower than the user sessions because some users visit more than once in the reporting period). Of the total reported by the 24 TCE servers, we represented 67.7% of the pages, 56.3% of the unique hosts, and nearly 78% of the total data served.

Aggie Horticulture is actually a network of servers, including static information servers, dynamic database servers, and streaming video content servers. The content is provided by Extension specialists, teaching and research faculty, county agents-horticulture, and Master Gardener programs throughout the state. One major new feature which has been added this year is the "agents only" section of the Extension site, a password protected area where specialists and agents can exchange PowerPoint presentations which are used primarily for Master Gardener training. This site is currently used by 74 people, and the interest is growing rapidly.

A user satisfaction survey was posted for brief periods on various entry points into our Web site during the period of May 16 to September 5, 2005. Three hundred seventy three (373) completed surveys were received. Of those:

83% were from Texas.
visited the site 5.45 times per month.
84% thought the Web site was overall good or outstanding.
74% made changes in their practices as a result of our information.
89% intend to use the information they received in the future.

While the survey sample represents a small fraction of the total Aggie Horticulture users, those responding overwhelmingly agreed that our Web site provides useful information.