The Creation Project Dominates our Website in 2016

It’s always fun (and helpful) to take a quick look at the stats for our website at the end of the year. Through the stats we can see a cross section of our ministry and we can see how our supporters have shared our ups and downs. Sometimes, we’re surprised at some of the ways our web site reaches beyond the normal borders of our every day lives.

Who in the world is watching us.

You can tell from the stats on our web site that the Creation Project was a big part of our year. The news that I was selected as one of the fellows for the creation project broke in April and shortly after that I started a series on the Evangelical’s Creation Conundrum. Both the news about the Creation Project and the series on creation were popular this year with over 1000 views. I’ve gotten lots of good feedback from people who have said they find the series helpful. If you haven’t read any of those posts yet please do and share them with others you think might be interested.

The four research fellows and our families. These people became very dear to us over the past few months.

The Multidimensional Aspect of our Ministry

The main reason we keep a web site is to communicate with supporters. It’s certainly not a major aspect of our ministry even though for most of our supporters it’s the main way they see into our daily lives. You may not realize that I also use toddjana.com as a portal for storing resources for the classes I teach at the seminary. Up in the menu at the top of the page you’ll see a menu item “KT” for “Department of Theology.” That’s where my students go for links to syllabi, Hebrew vocabulary, or exegesis templates. My Slovak students account for almost 20% of the traffic that passes through our website.

People are Finding Our Site on Google Search in Surprising Ways

In the last twenty eight days, twenty different Google searches have led people to our web site. Surprisingly, of those twenty searches, fourteen were searches to find out if yew trees are poisonous to dogs. Try it. Type “yew dog” into Google search and our web page should show up somewhere near the top. Why? Because a couple of years ago our dog, Bona, was poisoned by chewing on yew tree branches. I wrote a post about the experience in the form of a children’s story and it got lots of hits. Ever since then it seems that post has become the internet’s authority on dogs and yew trees. Because of all those Google search hits, that post was our most popular for all of 2016 drawing almost 1,500 visitors to our site.

Bona has been big on toddjana.com the last few years. In 2016 she broght 1,500 visitors.

What are some other searches that lead people to our site? Again, just from the last twenty-eight days, people clicked on our site after searching for the difference between cosmology and cosmogony, “narnia school,” “the stoning of saint stephen,” “slavo pastor,” “fear of god and beginning of wisdom,” “hebrew parallelism,” “synopsis of genesis,” and some others. On average, we get about five hits per day from Google searches.

Other than Bona, most searches that bring people to our site come to look at older content that I’ve posted about Genesis and the creation debate. Not counting the newer posts on the Evangelical’s Creation Conundrum, those posts have drawn about 1,000 visitors. My posts on the book of Acts have also drawn people so all together over 2,200 visitors came to our site to view the theology related content (in English).

It’s good to know that content continues to serve the church.

Vermont Keeps its Religion

The running joke on my site is that a couple of years ago no one from the state of Vermont visited our site. It was the only state in all the United States of America that we did not reach, putting it in the company of countries like North Korea, atheist, oppressive, corrupt and poor. Not that I meant to draw any correlation ;-). At the end of the year I entitled the post summarizing our web traffic, “You Are Not from Vermont and Other Interesting Facts about our Site.” This year, Vermont contributed two visits to our site, with a total of three page views.

Way to go Vermont! Thanks to you we had visitors from every state this year.

The top states for visiting our site are Illinois (as expected), California, Texas, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Georgia, Michigan, and Tennessee. The top countries are the US, Slovakia, UK, Russia, Canada, Czech Republic, Australia, Germany and Austria. We had visitors from 100 countries this year.

All in all it was a pretty good year for toddjana.com. Thanks for visiting and sharing our site with others.