Dead week was not so dead

A couple of things in the latest Quill Engage report for theorion.com caught my eye this week:
• For the second straight week, The Orion's website gained more visitors than the week before.
• More people used their smartphones to read the news than any other platform.

People visited the site 6,217 times during the week and viewed 16,083 pages. That means the average visitor looked at 2.59 pages, driving the bounce rate (the percentage of visits that consisted of just one page view) down to 35.24 percent. That's very good.

Total traffic also was better than the same week last year, which is pretty exciting.

Besides more traffic, the significant statistic in this paragraph was how people visited. Smartphones were the device of choice by about 40 visits over desktop. That's important, of course, but the trend over a year ago is really important: Mobile-device visits were up 135 percent from a year before.

Editors should be thinking about that as they consider how stories are going to be told via the web next semester.

Here are the top 10 pages visited during dead week (number one is the home page):